The Political Culture of the New Social Movements

Abstract

During the past two decades there has been a lasting shift in the patterns of political orientation and action in Germany. Whereas the post-war and reconstruction period was characterized by the amalgamation of an authoritarian ‘subject culture’ (Almond and Verba 1963) and privatistic retreat, today large groups of the population have developed a participatory concept of democracy. Although this transformation has taken place in a complex arena of economic, political and socio-cultural modernization, a major element of these changes was the ‘new social movements’. In various successive waves traditional notions of order and authority were shaken by the counter-cultural youth and student movements of the late 1960s, by the women’s movement, the environmentalists, and the anti-nuclear protest of the 1970s, by the spread of a dense network of urban ‘alternative’ milieus at the end of that decade, by the peace movement of the early 1980s, and the revived mass protest against nuclear power after Chernobyl.