Civil Disobedience and Modernity, 1978–1987 137
The demonstration in Bonn on October 10, 1981, was attended by
250,000 people – the largest in the history of the republic. Schmidt
soon was marginalized with the tiny fraction of his party against the
majority who passionately opposed the deployments.
By June 1982, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher had
begun to contemplate taking the FDP out of the coalition with the
weakened SPD. In late August, Genscher was concerned about the
rise of neutralist sentiment in the SPD.^6 Genscher’s FDP instead
chose to seek a coalition with the Christian Democratic Union
(CDU) and its leader Helmut Kohl.^7 In September’s parliamentary
debates, the majority of Social Democrats argued that acceptance of
the missiles was not in the German national interest. As the leader of
a party long restive in its coalition with the SPD, Genscher resigned
as foreign minister. By an unprecedented use of the parliamentary
constructive vote of no confidence on October 1, 1982, the thirteen-
year rule of the Social-Liberal coalition had reached its end.
In the March 1983 elections called to replace Schmidt’s govern-
ment, the SPD put forward a former justice minister and mayor
of Munich, Hans-Jochen Vogel, and proceeded to suffer its worst
defeat since 1961. The Green Party broke the 5 percent mark for the
first time, becoming the first new party to enter Parliament since
1953.^8 Die Wende signified by Chancellor Kohl’s election had begun.
The Bundestag voted for the missiles 286 to 226. Five days later, the
missiles arrived in West Germany.
HABERMAS AND DIE WENDE: “MODERNITY” AND
VARIETIES OF CONSERVATIVE CHALLENGE
The four years of the Euromissile debate, between the December
1979 NATO decision and the stationing of the missiles in November
1983, reoriented the Federal Republic politically. We shall turn to
Habermas’s view of the protestors in a section devoted to his legal
theory below. Here, we examine Habermas’s view of the ideological
significance of die Wende as it was reflected in both his philosophical
writings on “modernity” and his political writings on the growth of
(^6) Ibid., 158.
(^7) Ibid., 159.
(^8) The results of the election were CDU 45.8 percent, FDP 6.9 percent, SPD
38.2 percent, and Greens 5.6 percent.