Civil Disobedience and Modernity, 1978–1987 135
THE EUROMISSILE DEBATE AND THE PARTY-POLITICAL REALIGNMENT
OF 1982 AS CONTEXT FOR THE DEFENSE OF “MODERNITY”
On December 12, 1979, NATO foreign and defense ministers
decided to deploy over 500 intermediate-range nuclear missiles
(Pershing II and cruise) in Western Europe, partly in West
Germany. Helmut Schmidt had begun his career in national govern-
ment as the Defense Minister to Willy Brandt; he had been chan-
cellor since 1974. Schmidt supported the missiles on the grounds
that the deployment of comparable missiles (SS-20s) in Eastern
Europe by Soviet Premier Leonid Breszhnev constituted a breach
of a May 1978 agreement to maintain nuclear parity with the West.
The decision sparked a divisive four-year-long debate over German
foreign policy, exacerbating tensions within the Social Democratic
Party (SPD) between its left and right wings that contributed to the
unraveling of the Social-Liberal coalition.
The December 1979 decision of SPD Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt to press forward with the deployments produced huge
opposition, creating the largest political demonstrations in the his-
tory of the Bonn Republic and adding strength to the newly estab-
lished Green Party. From 1979 until the end of his government in
October 1982, Chancellor Schmidt was under pressure from intel-
lectuals and activists of the peace movement to revise his decision
on the missiles. Although Schmidt insisted that Soviet advantages
in conventional and nuclear forces required a response, the large
majority of his own party disagreed with him. This exacerbated a
trend visible from the mid-1970s – the SPD was losing support on
its left flank. Heterogeneous groupings representing broadly paci-
fist, environmentalist, and feminist positions developed in some
Länder. In March 1979, the “Other Political Association”(SPV) was
founded with the support of Nobel Prize–winning author Heinrich
Böll and German Socialist Students’ League (SDS) veteran Rudi
Dutschke. Petra Kelly was its most charismatic leader. In October,
a Green Party list got into the Bremen Land Parliament with just
over 5 percent of the vote, and the Greens became a nationwide
political party on January 13, 1980. Although the Greens did not
reach the minimum 5 percent threshold for parliamentary repre-
sentation in the November 1980 federal elections, their growing
popularity underlined the disagreement over the direction of the