Politics of Security

‘Through its comparative nature and its awareness for transnational relations and mutual observations’, writes Holger Nehring, this book ‘... seeks to bring together the histories of two countries under one conceptual rubric’. The outcome should be assessed against the sheer difficulty of the task. ‘Comparative’ and ‘world’ history, now fashionable, are, or should be, linguistically demanding. They also require empathy in two dimensions: historical and geographical. Nehring’s firm grasp of the German and English languages is therefore most welcome, especially as books published in English have treated post-war Germany so inadequately by comparison with the overworked Nazi period. Nehring has read voraciously in both languages, his interests are wide-ranging, and he yearns to learn from other disciplines. Furthermore, far from contenting himself with mere compilation, he thinks. Nehring’s book is perhaps best summarised by identifying the Anglo-German similarities and contrasts between these two anti-nuclear movements. The similarities are numerous. In both countries the anti-nuclear dynamic seems, with hindsight, to have accelerated surprisingly slowly after 1945. This was because the urgent priority then lay with reconstruction, not with destruction; because governments struggled to keep the bomb and its effects under wraps; and because scientists had yet to appreciate radiation’s impact on health. Both movements drew heavily on support from the left, the young, the middle class, religious groups, and women (while confining the latter to subordinate roles). Both viewed the USSR more hopefully than their governments: détente, they thought, was feasible. Early on, the mood of both was rationalistic and ‘emotionally restrained’, but such constraints relaxed in the mid-1960s. Both, at first, focused single-mindedly on nuclear weapons, distancing themselves even from pacifism; from the mid-1960s, however, they diversified into and fertilised many other progressive movements

Economic history · German · Hindsight bias · Political science · Politics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology