The SPD and the Challenge of Mass Politics: The Dilemma of the German Volkspartei by Diane L Parness

Author:Diane L Parness [Parness, Diane L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000305982
Google: tnCdDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 51822898
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Citizens' Initiative Groups in the Federal Republic

The First Wave

The first Buergerinitiativen that appeared on the West German political scene in the early sixties hardly resembled what we now label an extraparliamentary movement. Flustered by the established parties' lack of attention to strictly local concerns, they set out to accomplish what the parties would not attain for them. Their goals ranged widely, and typically included installing a stop sign at a busy intersection, setting up a child day care center, limiting fare increases for bus service, or establishing a transportation service for the handicapped. They were most successful when their goals appealed to a broad range of citizens who discovered a new means of helping those people and projects which had fallen through the cracks of the system. While these progenitors of the movement did operate outside of parliament, they largely complemented the work of the political parties. Few, if any, harbored any aspirations to reform parliament or otherwise challenge the political system.

APO later influenced the Buergerinitiativen to the extent that many adopted APO's tactics for political "education," which included papering entire neighborhoods with leaflets, initiating street discussions, and creating "scenes," but external resemblances between the Buergerinitiativen and APO quickly vanished. Always more practically oriented and with a more limited and concrete focus than any of the so-called movements, the Buergerinitiativen were never affected by the ideological debates that surrounded the student movement.33 As a long-time student of the Buergerinitiativen has suggested, ideology plays a very limited role with citizen initiative groups, and Marxism in particular has very little to offer them: "Not the critique of the political economy, but the critique of inhumane ecology is their theme."34

By the mid-seventies the power and efficacy of these local popular initiatives was such that Buergerinitiativen emerged as an autonomous political force in West Germany. By this time their ranks were swollen with APO emeriti, disillusioned former SPD members, and current party members who sought a more direct approach to political influence.35 For many of these new participants in the Buergerinitiativbewegung, rebellion against the establishment had evolved toward a more constructive approach to seeking alternative lifestyles and modes of political involvement. In this sense the student movement provided an important psychological push for the Buergerinitiativen.36 On a more concrete level, massive demonstrations organized in 1969 against proposed drastic increases in public transport fares transformed the Buer gerinitiativen overnight into a national political phenomenon.

Mobilization of the Buergerinitiativen for a national political aim was exceptional in that it provoked a turnabout in the pattern of extraparliamentary political activity. While APO had focused on macropolitical and international goals from 1965 to 1969, the Buergerinitiativen concentrated primarily on regional and communal goals which held little or no significance for national problems.37 This would quickly change in the period following the dissolution of APO.

Misgivings concerning the objectives and responsiveness of political parties and trade unions that had sparked APO now spread in more moderate guise to a much broader segment of the population. Persistent and growing disillusionment with the

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