Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the USA during the Cold War (review)

The simplest narratives about the Cold War tell a story of high politics in which the leaders of two great powers, with the support—or over the opposition—of the leaders of smaller powers, managed a bipolar confrontation that dominated the second half of the twentieth century. From the earliest stages of the Cold War, however, activists formed peace movements to prevent future wars in general and to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Like the leaders they often criticized, these peace movements shaped the contours of Cold War politics. A great deal of work remains to be done in making sense of the origins, development, and impact of these peace movements, and Benjamin Ziemann has done all of us a service in soliciting thirteen high-quality essays offering different perspectives on peace movements in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan.

Peace movements during the Cold War were hardly unitary actors, and campaigns for peace or against particular wars and weapons systems took different forms at different times and in different places. Sometimes activists made relatively marginal claims about how to conduct the Cold War more safely or effectively, but in other cases they offered broad political criticisms and demanded the remaking of the liberal democracies in which they sometimes flourished. This broad and diverse reality, narrowed by the volume’s vision to fifty years across three continents, affords scholars a great deal of latitude in addressing the topic. Most of the authors here are historians, and they have delved into all kinds of original sources to provide compelling analytical narratives of (often) narrow topics. For some readers, the value of this volume may be the sum total of these compelling chapters.

To make sense of the larger project, Ziemann contributes a thoughtful introduction laying out a broad range of issues that come to play in the analysis of peace movements during this long and critical time. He lays out at least three general categories of topics. First is the wide range of influences on the ebbs and flows of activism and the development of political claims and tactics. On these issues, the book provides fascinating insights into the importance of political context. Dieter Rucht’s sociological overview, at the end of the book, provides evidence of the timing and size of large demonstrations and an overview of the demonstrators. Each chapter gives a different picture of activists confronting the distinct politics and cultures of the states in which they operated. In seeking to forestall mass unrest, Western democracies often punished their own dissidents, who sometimes faced taunts, blacklists, and political marginalization. In Greece, however, activists risked their own lives—and sometimes lost because the authoritarian government saw criticism of Cold War politics as a threat to its own legitimacy and survival.

The second main topic is who these peace activists were, what they wanted, and what they did. Each chapter provides a distinct snapshot providing a sense of the diverse claims and people that animated peace protest. Michael Foley’s portrayal of U.S. draft resisters during the Vietnam War offers a compelling portrait of young people seeking to escalate their efforts to stop the war and bring their lives in line with their values. The second section of the book explicitly considers the iconography and symbolism employed by peace movements. In creating symbols to define themselves and their opponents, the peace movements challenged dominant cultures and put new symbols and claims into mainstream culture. Jeremy Vacon’s account of the U.S. anti-war movement’s use in its campaign of the flag of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) shows the potential consequences of symbolic choices. Displaying the NLF flag provoked divisions within the antiwar movement and gave opponents a target to use in discrediting the movement as naive, unpatriotic, or Communist-allied. Peace movements consistently received all of these criticisms in a wide variety of contexts, but the NLF flag...