Dieter Rucht. Protest in der Bundesrepublik: Strukturen und Entwicklungen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2001. 322 S. EUR 34.00 (gebunden), ISBN 978-3-593-36451-3.

Reviewed by Karrin Hanshew (Department of History, University of Chicago)
Published on H-German (March, 2004)

With the publication of this volume of collected essays, Dieter Rucht presents us with the individual efforts of several scholars to fill the gap in current knowledge and understanding regarding protest in the Federal Republic and, to a lesser extent, in unified Germany. Frustrated with the "vague speculations" that, in their minds, continue to dominate scholarly discussions on the development and character of protest, Rucht and his collaborators set out to create a systematic and empirically based analysis of collective and public protest (p. 7). Above all, this analysis favors a wide spectrum of protest behavior over individual or serial examples of high-conflict protest in an attempt to capture the long-term trends and structural characteristics of protest within (West) Germany since the 1950s.

Each of the volume's eight essays draws from the project, "Documentation and Analysis of Protest Events in the Federal Republic of Germany" (Prodat) carried out at the Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung in Berlin. Since its inception in 1992, Prodat has collected a database for the examination of change and continuity in German protest between 1950 and 1994. Due to the paucity and nature of material for the former German Democratic Republic, data is limited to West and, beginning in 1990, unified Germany. As the project's central unit of analysis, a "protest event" is defined in the introduction as a "collective, public action by non-state actors that successfully expresses a critique or protest and that is connected to the formulation of a social or political demand" (p. 19). The project's source base is limited to two nationally distributed newspapers, the Frankfurter Rundschau and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The volume's individual essays follow the editor's introduction of Prodat--its background and central premises--in chronological order. The first full essay, co-authored by Rucht and Friedhelm Neidhardt, expands upon the methodology of Prodat and provides an overview of protest in the FRG that largely encompasses the work and conclusions of the next seven essays. The authors confront potential (and real) criticisms of Prodat's limited source base head-on and openly concede that the picture provided by their media sample far from represents the entire reality of protest. In addition, they acknowledge the significant influence of media selectivity on their results. The authors counter such objections, however, by emphasizing the importance of reception in determining an individual protest's political-social weight. Without an intermediary force to sympathize with the protesters' message and, ultimately, to create the pressure on established political institutions necessary to enact change, the protest cannot succeed (pp. 33-34). Rucht and Neidhardt state that journalists, more than any other intermediary force, are responsible for making protest "real" by registering it and thereby validating it as an event. Only in this way does protest find a place in the perceptions and opinions of the population in general and of decision-makers in particular (pp. 62-63).

The rest of Rucht and Neidhardt's essay is spent on the conclusions gleaned from Prodat. The authors confirm that protest has increased steadily since the late 1960s and, with it, political "pressure from below" (p. 35). Of note is the diversification of protest themes and a greater number of small, informal initiatives, groups, and networks than previously. Going against what many might expect with the increasing internationalism of problems and the supranationalism of political regimes in the recent past, there is no appreciable evidence of a corresponding social or political expansion of the protest arena. Protest actors are drawn mainly from the local or regional level and their agendas remain overwhelmingly--and in some cases increasingly--concerned with local and regional themes (pp. 51-52). Also running contrary to what one might guess regarding the development of protest in western societies, the data shows that the number one motivation for protest continues to be traditional labor concerns and not post-materialist agendas (p. 38). Although Rucht and Neidhardt argue for the continuity of labor as the main protest theme, they assert that the very low incidence of violence reflects a change in the relationship of state and society to labor--suggesting the successful institutionalization of labor conflicts in the FRG. Furthermore, they hypothesize that the current absence of formerly volatile issues such as ecology and feminism as protest themes can be explained by the analogous success of these movements in achieving mainstream political legitimacy (p. 42). Unfortunately, the same cannot be said when it comes to conflict around the issue of ethnic minorities, where protest is demonstrably at its most militant. Since the beginning of the 1990s, protest in both eastern and western Germany has been characterized by a dramatic increase of violence against foreigners. The new Bundeslaender demonstrate a proportionally higher incidence of anti-foreigner protest and the absence of a significant counter-protest movement comparable to that in the old Bundeslaender (p. 61). The lack of key resistance to the anti-foreigner contingent cause the authors to conclude that unified Germany is a society divided between the still weak civil society of the new Bundeslaender and the robust, dominantly left-liberal political public of western Germany (p. 67).

The second essay in the collection, Anja Corinne Baukloh's piece on anti-National Socialist protest in the years between 1950 and 1960, contributes to a growing literature presently dismantling perceptions of 1950s West Germany as silent and studiously apolitical. In her study, Baukloh demonstrates how the recent past was frequently thematized by protesters addressing the consequences of the National Socialist regime and by those actively opposing the organized right extremism of the postwar period. While the vast majority of these protesters had histories of antifascist activity (p. 96), Baukloh argues that these "veterans" were joined by a small number of students and politicized youths in a simultaneous process of legitimating the new, democratic order and de-legitimating the old. This early public confrontation with the past sets up the shift in climate of the early 1960s regarding the political past, revealing itself to be a decisive moment in the re-definition of social and political responsibilities in a new, German democracy (pp. 97-98). With the overwhelming majority of protests organized by historically antifascist groups, however, one questions what can properly be ascribed to the active learning process that Baukloh describes and what is better understood as a continuation of earlier protest forms and understandings of democracy.

Ruud Koopmans's essay on "Alter Rechtsextremismus und neue Fremdenfeindlichkeit" traces the development of right-wing extremism and anti-foreigner sentiment--the change in its degree and goals, as well as its action and organizational forms--between 1950 and 1994. His study reveals that right-extremist activities are indisputably a phenomenon of the 1990s and cannot be attributed to the ongoing presence of neo-fascist or National Socialist sentiments in Germany. Both the predominance of violence and the anti-foreigner content of protest that characterize today's right-extremist activity break sharply with traditional right extremism, as do their weak organizational structures (pp. 108-109). Koopmans goes on to analyze a number of social, political, and economic factors and ultimately argues against another common hypothesis for the dramatic increase of anti-foreigner sentiment, namely that the phenomenon is an "unreflective reaction" to economic and social insecurity (pp. 113-115, 117). His study demonstrates that the strongest causal factor in right-extremist activity is an increase in immigration. Contrary to expectations, however, it does not appear to be a reaction to the long-term strains associated with the overall presence of foreign populations and the actual level of immigration (competition over jobs and resources) but instead to short-term integration problems resulting from concentrated flows of newly arrived emigrants (p. 118-119). Moreover, Koopmans emphasizes the importance of the political context in generating and shaping protest, arguing that anti-foreigner sentiment was significantly aggravated by the differentiation made between desirable (i.e. repatriated Germans) and "undesirable" (asylum seekers) immigrants in the public debate over immigration policy in the early 1990s (p. 119). Ultimately, he concludes that rather than a failure to come to terms with Germany's past the problem is much more a failure to come to terms with Germany's present and future as an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous nation. This knowledge suggests that classical methods of fighting traditional right extremism need to be exchanged for solutions that address the "regulation of immigration, the integration of new immigrant populations, and lastly the redefinition of German national identity" (pp. 125-126).

Dieter Rucht's piece on the changing faces of the first of May as a day of protest sets out to demonstrate the wide-reaching possibilities Prodat has as a tool for social scientists outside the realm of purely quantitative analyses. Using evidence drawn from Prodat in conjunction with historical literature, Rucht examines the ways in which May 1 has changed from a "Kampftag," in which labor both literally and figuratively defined a space for itself, to a day dominated by activities around, rather than central to, its original intent. Of foremost interest is the relative lateness of this development. Rucht demonstrates that the first of May maintained its status among workers as a legitimate representation of worker identity and community from its inception in 1890 until the second half of the twentieth century. Not until the 1960s and the rising dominance of the Extraparliamentary Opposition did worker participation dramatically decrease and retreat indoors--giving up labor's earlier symbolic claim on the streets (pp. 167-168). Today May Day has all but ceased to contain any reference to worker concerns, identity, or their "struggle." And, as Rucht relates, even the few remaining protest rituals are little more than a tired joke in the face of labor's full incorporation into institutionalized politics (p. 171).

In the fifth essay of the volume, Rucht joins Jochen Roose in defending the ecology movement from theories of its institutionalization and, more specifically Robert Michels's theory of "oligarchialization," whose criteria they see as weighted against a fair evaluation of new social movements in general (p. 177). Rucht and Roose argue that there is not sufficient evidence to support the notion that the ecology movement has outlived its rebellious years or that, by the 1990s, it is best understood as having been co-opted by existing institutions. While their findings demonstrate that the movement has undergone a large degree of professionalization--both the stasis of the movement's infrastructure and activities and the specialized functions and roles of its key participants (p. 205)--the two men argue that these developments cannot be used to overlook the frequency and form of the movement's activities or its continued reliance on informal and case-by-case interactions. According to Rucht and Roose, "the ecology movement and, in particular the anti-nuclear movement, remains offensive in its protest and decentralized in its structures" (p. 204). They conclude that the presence of the ecology movement as a partner at the negotiating table does no harm to its protest activities; whereas in the 1970s the ecology movement may have understood itself only in terms of protest, today its self-definition has expanded to encompass both (ibid).

The examination of the ecology movement leads smoothly to the next essay, Peter Hocke's study of the importance of students for the history of protest in the FRG. In a comparison of Freiburg with other similarly sized university and non-university towns, Hocke concludes that, although students have been and continue to be influential participants in protests, university towns are not unusually prone to protest activities or even dominated by student interests. Students, rather than acting as primary carriers of protest, are demonstrably broad in their participation and in their concerns. Indeed, students seem particularly capable of bridging diverse groups and protest themes (p. 235). Hocke argues therefore that far more decisive for a city's level and content of protest activity than its student population, is its position as a seat of government (p. 219) and its own local factors such as the strong presence of labor or ecological concerns (p. 236).

Susann Burchardt's comparative essay on the new and old Bundeslaender investigates the relationship each "partial society" (p. 245) had to protest in the years immediately following reunification. Buchardt argues that the macro-level analysis made possible by Prodat underscores distinct differences in the actors, themes, and forms of protest in the two regions and thus disproves claims that the new Bundeslaender have quickly come to hold a relationship to protest similar to that found in the old Bundeslaender (p. 241). Bracketing evidence of "foreigners" as a dominant protest theme in both societies, Buchardt argues that the old Bundeslaender are overwhelmingly organized, nonviolent, and post-materialist in their protest. In contrast, protest in the new Bundeslaender is characterized by informal and spontaneous organization, high levels of violence, and material concerns (p. 269). Buchardt uses these findings to conclude that the different protests in eastern and western Germany are best understood as "movements of crisis" and "movements of affluence," respectively. According to the author, both the frequency and form of protest in the new Bundeslaender--including the prominence and violence of anti-foreigner protests--are the probable products of the economic and social crisis experienced by a society in transformation (p. 270). Evidence presented elsewhere in this volume questioning the straightforwardly "materialist" motivation of right-extremist activities (see Koopmans's essay), however, casts doubt on a "protest of crisis" as being adequate description of protest in the new Bundeslaender. When considered alongside Buchardt's limited engagement with right-extremism in the old Bundeslaender, one begins to doubt the explanatory power of her model.

Christiane Eilders concludes the volume by returning to the problem of media selectivity in reporting protest events. Her systematic study of the Frankfurter Rundschau, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the tageszeitung demonstrates a high level of agreement by all three newspapers on the "structural characteristics" by which protests are judged newsworthy. Eilders counters various media theories' expectation that "violence sells" (p. 301) by providing evidence that the leading factor in whether a protest is reported is, instead, the number of its participants (p. 303). She does not refute the presence of violence among the top selection criteria, however, with the protest themes labor, foreigners and ideology rounding out the group. Despite this high level of agreement on what warrants reporting, Elders' study shows that the actual overlap of concrete events reported remains extremely low. She attributes this to the relatively high number of "newsworthy" choices available to each newspaper and the presence of regional bias--particularly strong in the case of the taz (p. 307). This divergence in protest reports convinces Eilders that the use of more than one newspaper source is fully justified from a "research-economical perspective," by providing both quantitatively and qualitatively superior results (pp. 308-309).

Taken together, the various essays provide the reader with a valuable introduction to the different forms, themes, and carriers of protest in the Federal Republic and unified Germany. In keeping with the scholars' desires to correct a literature prone to micro-level studies, the volume succeeds at providing a "bird's eye view" of many of the ways in which protest has changed or remained unaltered over the span of nearly fifty years. Indeed, by concentrating on the long-term developments of various forms of protest, the volume is able to reveal many of the assumptions regarding right-extremist and post-materialist protest as ungrounded. But just as too much close-range minutia is surely not the answer, studies dependent on research factors of quantifiable nature quickly run up against their own limitations, particularly in scholarship attempting to understand a topic as diverse and resistant to categorization as protest in Germany. The job of future scholars will be to overcome the gap between quantitative and qualitative approaches--to bridge the macro- and micro-levels of social scientific observation--and to write a history of protest in the FRG that encompasses both its particular contexts and its structural developments.

Copyright (c) 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.

Citation: Karrin Hanshew. Review of Rucht, Dieter, Protest in der Bundesrepublik: Strukturen und Entwicklungen. H-German, H-Net Reviews. March, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8976

Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.