Civil Disobedience and Modernity, 1978–1987 153
situation could spiral out of control. “Never before in the Federal
Republic have so many people taken to the streets for a political goal
which many of us consider pressing and rational,” wrote Habermas
in the immediate wake of the movement’s “Week of Action” in late
October 1983.^74 The unprecedented scale of mobilization and the
widespread practice of civil disobedience by the peace movement in
response to the Euromissile debate marked “a turning point in the
political culture of the Federal Republic.” The practice of “nonvio-
lent resistance” by thousands “... [gave] the public, for the first time,
the chance to liberate itself from a paralyzing trauma and look with-
out fear on the previously taboo question of the formation of radical
democratic consciousness.”^75 Civil disobedience was the major tac-
tic used by the Euromissiles’ opponents. Two of Habermas’s for-
mer research assistants at the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg,
Ernst Tugendhat and Claus Offe, were among the members of the
so-called Promi-Blockade (“blockade by the prominent”) in which
protesters formed “human chains” to blockade a U.S. depot of
Pershing missiles in Mutlangen from August 30 to September 3.
Prominent politicians and intellectuals such as Oskar Lafontaine,
Petra Kelly, Erhard Eppler, Heinrich Böll, and Heinrich Göllwitzer
also participated.
In the two essays Habermas wrote on the subject of the peace
movement and civil disobedience, he took a strong position against
the missiles on policy grounds.^76 The installation of “first-strike
atomic weapons” caused a “destabilization of the relation between
the superpowers,” Habermas wrote. His characterization of the
Pershing missiles as first-strike weapons clearly identifies him as
an anti-Euromissile partisan. But he took pains to be clear that he
was neither calling for civil disobedience nor endorsing the position
that there should be a formal right to it: “I find myself in the role
of a sympathizer who inclines towards an affirmative answer” on
whether breeches of the law can be justified as civil disobedience.^77
Habermas implied that individuals who broke the law were patriotic
and morally courageous, but they should have to bear the legal con-
sequences of their decision. That emergency measures were being
(^74) Habermas, “Recht und Gewalt. Ein Deutsches Trauma,” in DNU, 10 0 ; “ R i g ht a n d
Violence: A German Trauma,” in Cultural Critique 1 (Autumn 1985), 125–39.
(^75) Ibid., 101.
(^76) Habermas, “Recht und Gewalt,” 116.
(^77) Ibid., 114.