The World Says No to War: Demonstrations against the War on Iraq

4. Legacies from the Past: Eight Cycles of Peace Protest

4 Legacies from the Past: Eight Cycles of Peace Protest Bert Klandermans 61 Although the protest against the war in Iraq can be studied in its own right, it is also a link in a much longer chain of protest events regarding issues of peace and war. Large protest movements proceed in cycles; periods of mobilization and demobilization alternate. That no mass mobilization takes place does not necessarily mean a movement has disappeared, because between periods of mobilization, movements might continue to exist in abeyance (Taylor 1989), and such abeyance structures appear important in later periods of mobilization (see Downton and Wehr 1998; Everts and Walraven 1984; and Kleidman 1993 for examples regarding the peace movement). The dynamics underlying such cyclical developments are in part built into the very features of the movement. Obviously, peace movements respond to issues of peace and war in national and international contexts. Therefore, the peace movements in all eight countries of our study share a history of comparable mobilizations. Indeed, each has a tradition that goes back a long way and on occasion has been shown to have a strong mobilizing capacity. Perhaps more than any other, peace movements have reacted to international developments, be they nuclear armament, immanent wars, or tensions between states, for example. This explains why the various national movements have gone through similar cycles. At the same time, although the cyclical patterns are comparable, the amplitudes can be very different: there can be very big demonstrations in one country, while another sees only marginal ones. National circumstances are, of course, responsible for this variation. Inthischapter I will try to show how the interplay of general and countryspeci fic movement characteristics, international relations, and national politics account for similar, yet different, dynamics of mobilization. In doing so, I will concentrate on the last two protest waves—that against the deployment of cruise missiles and that against the First War in Iraq.1 The Movement against Cruise Missiles The movements against cruise missiles in Europe and the movement for a nuclear freeze in the United States developed against a background of a relatively stable geopolitical situation that underwent an increased polarization and remained largely unchanged over the course of the movement’s life (Klandermans 1991b). The Reagan years were characterized by marked tension between the superpowers, which were infused with new ideological zeal. Reagan’s rhetoric of the “Evil Empire” accompanied a massive escalation in U.S. defense expenditures and assumed a conception of security that made nuclear war seem possible in the European theater. This resulted in a general perception of threat that fueled the European peace movements (Rochon 1988). Moreover, that each national government had to decide on its territory ’s deployment brought the issue of nuclear armament home and constituted the basis for international alliances among national peace movements. The peace movement of the 1980s constituted one of the first occasions of significant interdependence among the social movement sectors of different European countries. Activists traveled extensively not only within countries but also between them, wherever the front of the struggle was perceived to be. None of the national movements could prevent its government from deciding to deploy cruise missiles, but this is not to say that the movements were failures.They did mobilize large proportions of the population, and they kept the cruise missiles on the political agenda for many years. The unspoken consensus on armament issues was definitely broken down. The movement in the United States took a different direction. The call for a nuclear freeze succeeded in creating a broad coalition that mounted a formidable political force.The movement commanded enough resources and allies that it could successfully challenge the president’s planned deployment of a new generation of missiles, the MX. Despite the common grievance, the movements in the various countries differed sometimes considerably because of local circumstances. A brief overview of the movements in the countries where we conducted our research underlines this point.2 United States In the United States the campaign against cruise missiles never really got off the ground, primarily because the trajectories of the peace movements in 62 bert klandermans Europe and the United States were rather different.3 Indeed, at some point the goals that the European and U.S. movements had defined for themselves were almost incompatible. While in Europe the peace movement focused on cruise missiles, in...