Introduction: Peace Movements in Southern Europe during the 1970s and 1980s

The contributions to this special section explore the history of peace protests in the three Southern European countries of Greece, Italy and Spain during the 1970s and 1980s. The articles emphasise the multi-dimensional nature of Southern European peace movements in this period. Protests were partly triggered by the NATO Double-Track Decision taken in 1979 to offer the Warsaw Pact talks on arms limitation alongside the threat to deploy nuclear-armed Cruise Missiles in Western Europe should the talks fail. This issue was particularly pertinent in Italy, which was earmarked as one of the five countries in which the intermediate nuclear missiles were to be deployed. Yet the aim of reversing or halting the Double-Track Decision and stopping the deployment of Cruise Missiles was only one theme that resonated with the protesters. In Greece and Spain, the mobilisation was directed, respectively, against the country’s membership in NATO or its recent entry to it. The protests in the two countries were connected to their recent experience of military dictatorship: a past that cast a long shadow over their political cultures. Here, therefore, also in Italy, which was characterised by the widespread presence of right-wing and left-wing terrorism and the looming threat of a neo-fascist right during the so-called anni di piombo (‘leaden years’), peace protests were thus linked to the assertion of popular participation, and to the rediscovery of a culture of civic activism in a burgeoning civil society.

The 1970s and 1980s were a watershed period in postwar European history. The NATO Double-Track Decision in December 1979 not only highlighted the crisis of détente and the hardening of the confrontation between the military blocs in East and West. It also strengthened already existing anxieties about a potential nuclear war. These anxieties partly built on the increasing civilian use of nuclear technology that had been the focus of environmentalist protests since the early 1970s. Another reason was the leak of an internal report from the US Pentagon to the Washington Post in June 1977. The report discussed the merits of the Neutron Bomb – which would kill human beings but leave the built infrastructure intact –, aggravating concerns about radiation poisoning and opening a diplomatic rift between European NATO members and the US. ¹ In the wake of the Double-Track Solution, the potential deployment of intermediate nuclear missiles in five European countries triggered a wave of protests, and not only in those five countries. When deployment commenced in 1983, protests continued, with a focus on the military bases at which the missiles were stationed. The anti-nuclear protests across Europe aimed to overturn the NATO Double-Track Decision in the first instance. ² Yet they were also connected to a wider set of issues that motivated different groups and currents within the broad coalition of collective actors in these protest movements: concerns about the pollution of the environment, about the sexism and gender inequalities that militarism and the use of weapon’s technologies engenders, and anti-American resentment against the military might and the consumerist lifestyle and dangerous modernity that the USA seemed to represent, to name only a few.

Over the past 20 years, these anti-nuclear peace movements in Western Europe have been the focus of a rich and conceptually increasingly sophisticated historiography. Following in the footsteps of the broad comparative overview provided by Lawrence Wittner, ³ monographs and edited collections have explored different dimensions of European peace mobilisation during the late 1970s and 1980s. One specific focus of this work has been threat perceptions, while another has been on the emotional regimes that allowed the protesters to speak openly about their fears and anxieties and to claim their subjectivity as a resource for the mobilisation against nuclear weapons. ⁴ Another important theme is the gendering of peace protests. At least two different dimensions should be distinguished here. There is first the gendering of the frames of protest. The notion of ‘framing’, developed by sociologists who studied the dynamics of protest movements, has been widely applied by historians. The basic argument of this approach posits that protest movements only emerge when the contours of a conflict are generated by protest communication, and the movements are hence able to connect with specific audiences. To facilitate these connections and to sustain the protests over a certain period, their appeal has to be ‘framed’ by collective patterns of interpretation. These ‘frames’ refer either to the problems at stake and thus to ‘the attribution of blame’ by the protesters, or to possible motives for protest, or to the negative consequences of a failure to mobilise successfully. ⁵

Gendered framing can apply at all three different levels of the framing process. At the diagnostic level of identifying the hazards of nuclear mobilisation, female peace activists blamed what they saw as the male power craziness of leading US politicians such as President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State General Alexander Haig, as the main source for the dynamics of the arms race and the volatility of international politics. ⁶ But gender was also a factor in the mobilisation process itself, namely through the emergence of women’s groups who campaigned autonomously in the context of a wider struggle for the articulation and political reformulation of female subjectivity. Important spaces for these campaigns were the women’s peace camps that were often set up at sites that had been earmarked for the deployment of intermediate nuclear missiles, as for instance Greenham Common in the UK and the La Ragnatela peace camp in Comiso, Sicily. ⁷

Another innovative trend in recent historiography into the European protest movements against the Double-Track Decision has been the attention to the spatial structures and scales that mediated and facilitated the identification of the risks of a potential nuclear war. A crucial prerequisite for peace mobilisation was the ability to translate the abstract knowledge about the potential consequences of an all-out nuclear war into patterns of representation that made their impact visible at the local level, in the immediate small-scale spaces in which people lived. One important method of achieving this translation process was the mapping of nuclear destruction in the context of the particular city in which the peace movement activists operated, bringing the threat right to their ‘apartment door’ and thus trying to trigger a sense of fear and consternation that could be turned into mobilisation. Yet, the orientation towards the small-scale affected not only the problem perception but also the politics of the peace movement, which tried to build on the localised nature of activism, for instance by getting city councils to declare their local area a nuclear weapons-free zone. ⁸ This is just one example for the ways in which historical research on peace movements during the 1970s and 1980s has contributed to a broader rethinking of the wider reconfiguration of the political sphere in this period.

For all its conceptual innovation, however, research on peace movements in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s has one significant blind spot: Southern Europe. ⁹ The transnational connections of peace movements across Europe were an important part of mobilisation against the Double-Track Decision, including attempts to connect movement activists across the Iron Curtain, reaching out to groups and initiatives in the GDR, Poland, the Soviet Union and other East-European countries. ¹⁰ Yet while there is a clear sense that the anti-nuclear mobilisation wave of the 1970s and 1980s can only be understood in its European dimension, even the most comprehensive edited collections include chapters on West Germany, the UK, France, the Netherlands and occasionally also Belgium, while developments in Southern European countries – Italy, Spain and Greece – are not covered. ¹¹ This is more than just an oversight, as the history of peace movements in these three countries during these years will not only vary and enrich our understanding of the role of anti-nuclear protests during the last decade of the Cold War but also complicate it.

All three countries were NATO members, with Spain’s entry into the western military alliance coming in 1982. This was in the first instance an attempt to bring the army under control, after a short-lived military coup attempt on 23/24 February 1981 had exposed the fragility of Spain’s transition to democracy in the wake of the long-term military dictator Franco’s death in 1975. In Greece as well, where the colonels’ repressive regime had come to an end in 1974, the need to overcome the legacy of military dictatorships and the imperative to rebuild and expand democratic institutional structures, values and practices provided a crucial context for the anti-nuclear mobilisation of the late 1970s and 1980s. Another shared characteristic of anti-nuclear protests in all three countries was the crucial yet also problematic position of the Communist parties and other groups on the radical left. In the UK, the Netherlands and West Germany, communists had no more than a marginal presence in the wider coalition of leftist, green, feminist and other groups that campaigned against the Double-Track Decision. While there was much talk about the protests being remote-controlled from Moscow, especially in a West Germany that bordered the Communist-governed GDR, there was no credible evidence for this claim, and the real fault-line was not between Communists and all others, but running right through large social democratic parties which needed to steer a course between their commitment to NATO and their commitment to peace. ¹²

The comparative approach of bringing together Spain, Italy and Greece in a common South European regional frame dates back to the period under consideration. ¹³ Since the early 1950s, NATO’s ‘Southern Flank’ had been constructed in a process of redefining strategic interests after the collapse of fascism and the end of the Second World War. This geopolitical concept of Southern Europe had initially been used in a rather one-dimensional sense, in an effort to map international security politics in the polarised world of the Cold War. It never served as a concept for analysing the region in question. The situation changed, however, with the fall of the dictatorships in Portugal, Spain and Greece by the mid-1970s and the southern enlargement of the European Economic Community in the 1980s. Henceforth, a new Southern Europe, comprising the three former dictatorships together with Italy, emerged in social and political sciences as a region-specific concept and a heuristic framework for comparative studies focussing on topics such as socio-economic modernisation, democratisation, welfare provision and party systems, among others. Major outcomes of this new regional focus in European studies were the publication in 1995 of one of the few substantial historiographical contributions to the field, a systematic comparative overview of half a century of the recent history of Southern Europe, including Turkey, after 1945 by the Italian economic historian Giulio Sapelli ¹⁴ as well as, in 1996, the foundation of the journal South European Society and Politics. ¹⁵

For Sapelli, Southern Europe was a distinct, specific socio-economic formation, differing from the rest of Continental Europe and from the British Isles due to its late industrialisation, a state which was weak and interventionist at the same time, a low degree of institutionalisation, and the disintegrating consequences of clientelism. ¹⁶ Sapelli’s view was representative of mainstream research on the European south under the spell of post-war Western master-narratives of modernity and modernisation. ¹⁷ The ambivalent position of the ‘South’ as a laggard, characterised by a syndrome of faults and deficiencies compared to the ‘West’, including economic backwardness, clientelism, patronage and corruption, to name just a few, had deep roots going back to the formation of the idea of the modern ‘West’ since the Enlightenment. ¹⁸ Notwithstanding repeated scholarly efforts, however, it had never led to the institutionalisation of a well-defined field of area studies: ‘At the end of the day, “Southern Europe” remains a highly elusive concept,’ as one scholar put it. ¹⁹ That this was the case was also due to its lack of clear-cut boundaries and of geographical coherence, in contrast to the spatial concept of the Mediterranean ²⁰ – which, moreover, is often used as a synonym for the European South, referring to the Euro-Mediterranean region. ²¹

Even though, after a short boom lasting until the 1990s, academic interest in the European South was flattening out after the end of the Cold War, Southern Europe did not disappear entirely from scholarly discourse. ²² Interest increased again significantly during the Eurozone crisis which began in 2009, while the countries of the European South were being labelled disparagingly in public debates as ‘PIGS’ (an acronym derived from the four nations involved, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain). When the crisis of the European Union (EU) expanded and deepened, the ‘South’ appeared again prominently on the academic agenda, according to some scholars as a political laboratory with its own brand of populist movements or in debates concerning a supposedly distinct South European political economy. ²³

In these renewed debates, one can distinguish basically three positions towards the Southern European framework. First, there are critical Southern exceptionalists who interpret the ‘South’ as a result of a supposed socio-cultural matrix shaped by geography, climate and socio-cultural factors such as religion and certain historical traditions. These scholars judge the region from a ‘Western’ perspective, readily drawing on stereotypical explanations from the arsenal of the ‘Southern European syndrome’. ²⁴ Second, there is a pragmatic approach, which sees the South European paradigm as a starting point for comparative research, admitting its usefulness as a research agenda for studying common historical paths without stressing cultural or historical factors and claiming strong ‘Southern’ peculiarities. This approach, however, has to define and explain supposed commonalities without falling into the trap of reinforcing region-based stereotypes. In the end, it might lead to dismiss the ‘South’ as a valid paradigm by highlighting its heterogeneity, questioning the adequacy of the South–North polarity, and pleading for more adequate settings for comparisons or the study of transnational crossings and entanglements. ²⁵ Third, there are ‘Southern exceptionalists’, who emphasise the socio-cultural distinctiveness of the European ‘South’ as a subject in its own right, as a part of the ‘Global South’, defending itself against perceived threats from the ‘North’ or the ‘West’ such as neoliberalism and finance capitalism. ²⁶

This kind of ‘militant Southernism’ ²⁷ has been fuelled by debates concerning the European debt crisis in Southern Europe. It has shown, not by chance, a particular interest in social movements which have contested the politics of austerity imposed on countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain by the European troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) since 2010. Geographer Lila Leontidou sees anti-austerity movements, protesting in the streets and piazzas of Greece and Spain, in a particular, romanticised Southern key, as part of a general mobilisation against a fierce attack by ‘Western’ (or ‘Northern’) power elites on ‘Southern cultures and ways of life’, expressing hostility towards a Mediterranean urban ‘eutopia’, embodying a distinctive notion of a ‘good life’, characterised by spontaneity, informality, creativity, and ‘joie de vivre’. ²⁸ There are, however, also scholars who apply the South European framework to the study of anti-austerity movements in a pragmatic way, focussing on historical pathways shared by southern countries or, depending on arguments and circumstances, marking differences between them. Political sociologist Donatella della Porta analyses international anti-austerity movements within the global dynamics of neoliberal capitalism, where ‘Southern Europe’ appears as a distinct semi-peripheral zone between the peripheral ‘Global South’ and the ‘Western’ or ‘Northern’ core. ²⁹ Another research project led by della Porta interrogates how the memory of political transitions from dictatorship to democracy influenced collective action and the identity of anti-austerity activists in the four ‘southern’ countries, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, by stressing differences between these countries resulting from different types of transitions from dictatorship to democracy. ³⁰

New social movements from the left in countries which are usually considered part of the European south have attracted academic interest from their early beginnings in the late 1960s and 1970s at a national level. Initially, the Southern European framework did not matter, even in studies using a cross-cultural approach. ³¹ In Italy, research emerged particularly early in an international context. Donatella della Porta set the standards for further research by publishing already in 1996 an important synthesis where she integrated previous studies, her own and those by scholars like Robert Lumley and Sidney Tarrow, into a comprehensive structural analysis of new social movements in Italy from their emergence in the late 1960s until the mid-1990s. ³² According to della Porta, there were more commonalities than differences in the rise and development of a ‘society of movements’ in Italy, in terms of phases and junctures, actors, goals and means of struggle, compared with other Western democracies like France and West Germany. As far as the peace movements of the early 1980s were concerned, she highlighted their pragmatic approach, after a period of radicalisation and ideological fundamentalism of the 1970s, focussed on concrete, limited claims, and characterised by the crucial role of experts and the alliance with other issues and movements, whether environmental politics or solidarity with the ‘Third World’. ³³

In Spain and Greece, new social movements emerged in the context of the transition from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy in a close relationship with leftist political parties, mainly communists and socialists with their experiences and reputation earned in underground resistance. Compared with the situation in the conflict-ridden Italian Republic, research concerning social movements in Spain and Greece gained momentum only rather belatedly in the 1990s, and was linked particularly with debates about the character and strength of ‘civil society’ in ex-dictatorships on their road to a ‘mature’ democracy. ³⁴ In the case of Spain, the formally illegal left parties and labour unions could assume a vanguard role in the fledging new social movements during the last, modernising years of the Franco regime. Thus, as recent research has maintained, dictatorship cannot be overemphasised as a delaying factor in the Spanish case. ³⁵ In the 1970s, neighbourhood associations in poor urban peripheries played a crucial role in building Spanish democracy at the grassroots. ³⁶ The high level of social mobilisation in the 1980s, the early years of post-Franco Spanish democracy, has mainly been attributed to the anti-NATO campaign as the central mobilising issue. The visibility and dynamics of peace campaigns depended to a large extent on the political configuration, particularly on the politics of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) while it was in opposition. The PSOE, like its counterparts in France and Greece, soon surpassed the communist PCE through promises of reformist change and succeeded in articulating the demands and aspirations of the new social movements. ³⁷ The peace movements’ impact is explained by at least two different arguments, emphasising situational factors of political context and power, or drawing on historical factors in a longue durée: while some scholars point to a particular ‘peace culture’ in Spain, fostered in recent history by factors such as the legacy of Francoism’s formal diplomatic neutrality, the traumatic memory of Civil War violence or the rejection of Basque terrorism, ³⁸ others prefer ‘an analysis based on the availability of political opportunities’ in order to explain mobilisation for peace. They explain them ‘as movements that experience sparks, with a temporarily high visibility, which have little to do with some allegedly permanent cultural characteristics’. ³⁹

The contributions to this special section try to avoid claims of Southern peculiarities and Southern exceptionalism, while using different approaches from the repertoire of the current peace movements’ studies. While peace movements in all of the three Southern European countries that are discussed here could rely on the organisational resources and institutional infrastructure of socialist and communist parties, they also needed a broader repertoire of symbolic communication to render their threat perceptions and the political fault lines that drove their activism both plausible and publicly visible. As Giulia Quaggio argues in her contribution to this special section, the realm of visual representation was at the same time ‘a pivotal battleground for contentious politics’ and a ‘universe of culturally shared meaning.’ A specificity of the Spanish anti-NATO movement in the 1980s was the use of murals and graffiti, co-produced by neighbourhood associations and local artists. As Quaggio points out, the visual codification of the protests encapsulated a diverse set of symbols. Anti-American sentiment was a recurring theme, depicted through popular symbols such as Uncle Sam, and encapsulated in the claim that the Spanish military was remotely controlled by the US, and underlined by a stress on the dangers of the Neutron bomb and other nuclear weapons that would affect Spain as a result of the collusion between the US and the conservative government of Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, the politician who had facilitated Spain’s entry into NATO in 1982. While the theme of anti-Americanism featured heavily in the peace movement iconography of other European countries, such as West Germany, ⁴⁰ the visual repertoire of the Spanish pintadas also included a strand of visuals that harked back to an idealised Spanish identity that had to be protected against the ‘cold’, technocratic modernity of Western societies. The preservation of national identity took centre-stage, even when it was represented in ironic terms by depicting Don Quixote in his – ultimately futile – fight against the windmills of NATO-missiles.

While the iconography of protest facilitated the emergence of grassroots movements, these movements often encountered the problem that their specific discourse, based on moral claims and the expression of emotions, was not taken seriously by the political establishment. As the contribution by Lodovica Clavarino argues, this was the point at which the scientific expertise of nuclear physicists entered the debate over nuclear weapons and the NATO Dual-Track solution. The focus of Clavarino’s article is the renowned Italian nuclear physicist Edoardo Amaldi (1908–89), who had started his career as a member of Enrico Fermi’s research group in the 1930s. Amaldi perceived the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a betrayal of the work that he and other Italian physicists had conducted. It prompted him to shift towards a life-long engagement in favour of nuclear arms control and disarmament. In Clavarino’s interpretation, Amaldi’s work for nuclear disarmament gained significance due to his key role in a wider network of Italian physicists who championed the same cause. Amaldi and his network were embedded both in international contexts such as the Pugwash Conferences, and addressed domestic Italian audiences, especially, but not exclusively, during the controversial debates of the deployment of intermediate nuclear missiles in the early 1980s. The contribution of Amaldi and his network is comparable to initiatives by other groups of scientists in this period. ⁴¹ The work of these physicists for peace is interpreted by Clavarino as a form of boundary work, in which scientists use their expertise to make claims that can be translated into the political arena. In Amaldi’s self-perception, his contribution to peace was distinct from that of the grassroots movement, as he and his colleagues did not take an ideological stance – even though, unlike Amaldi, many members of his network were staunch supporters of the Italian Communist Party, the PCI. At any rate, in the heated atmosphere of Italian domestic politics of the 1970s and 1980s, the support of leading scientists for nuclear disarmament was bound to provide a calming voice beyond party politics.

Peace movements usually represented oppositional forces within society, mobilising against the decision-making of their national government in the field of security policy. One major exception was the West German Social Democratic Party (SPD), whose own chancellor, Helmut Schmidt had effectively prepared the NATO Double-Track Solution with his speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London in October 1977. The contradiction between the SPD’s policies as a governing party and the widespread propensity of its membership to support unilateral nuclear disarmament of the West created frictions and deep conflicts within the party, before the loss of power to the Christian Democratic Union in late 1982 relieved these tensions. ⁴² These contradictions, however, were even more pronounced in the Greek case. The Greek peace movement had been dominated since 1955 by the Greek Committee for International Détente and Peace (EEDYE), which was closely affiliated with the Communist-led World Peace Council. As Eirini Karamouzi demonstrates in her contribution, this changed in 1981 with the emergence of two new movements of the left, KEADEA and AKE, both of which promoted pluralism and were uncomfortable with an entirely Soviet-friendly peace rhetoric. Yet KEADEA was closely linked to the socialist party PASOK under its leader Andreas Papandreou, who served as prime minister from October 1981. The messaging of the peace movement with its strongly anti-American sentiment and its nationalist self-affirmation vis-à-vis Turkey, which was perceived as the main threat to Greek security, was thus closely aligned with the demands that the popular leader Papandreou voiced as government policies. The Greek peace movement was unique as its master-frame was provided by a strong nationalist sentiment, and its demands closely coordinated with a governing party that could use the movement as leverage in its negotiations with the US over its continued military presence. In other respects, however, the Greek peace movement of the 1980s was closely aligned with its counterparts in Western Europe. It was able to tap into a well-established repertoire of symbolic acts and collective protest rituals that were widely used in other countries, and participated in or hosted the transnational exchange between peace movement activists across Europe.

As Kostis Kornetis argues in his contribution, anti-Vietnam war protests provided another inspiration for peace protests in Greece. His focus is on a series of public performances of popular music that served as rallying-points for protests against the Turkish occupation of Cyprus in 1974. These concerts were staged in the immediate aftermath of the transfer of power in Greece from the military junta to a civilian government. They were at the same a celebration of the demise of the Greek military dictatorship – with many of the artists having just returned from exile –, and a denunciation of the Turkish military. Through the participation of the mass audiences in the concerts and the focus on popular mobilisation in films that captured the excitement of these concerts and their immediate context, the public celebrations of popular artists also served to reinvigorate Greek civil society and assert its collective agency. Kornetis thus provides an important argument for the relevance of civil society beyond the parties for the reconstruction and reinvigoration of Greek democracy after the junta. By interpreting the fleeting moment of the shared performance and consumption of music as an act of cultural resistance, Kornetis also reminds us of the utopian potential that is part and parcel of all peace protests, an insight that is sometimes forgotten in the context of wider questions about mobilisation cycles and the political ramifications of peace movements.

The mobilisation of the Italian peace movement was overshadowed by the attempts of the Communist Party, PCI, to exert its authority over the diverse cross-section of groups and initiatives that were driving the protests in the late 1970s and 1980s. As Valentine Lomellini demonstrates in her contribution, these attempts were stuck in a double-bind, which marked the protests against the Euromissiles as a missed opportunity for the largest Communist party in Western Europe and ultimately contributed to its demise. The PCI’s decision to condemn the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in 1979 met with internal criticism, but it also ignited a wide-spread debate on the traditional PCI approach to foreign policy, which had always blamed Western imperialism for international tensions and emphasised the allegedly constructive nature of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy. At the same time, the PCI faced repeated warnings from Moscow about anti-Soviet tendencies within the broad coalition of the anti-nuclear mobilisation. Yet when falling into political isolation after the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro, the advocate of a political accommodation between the DC and the PCI, in 1978, the PCI recognised, focusing on the domestic situation, that the anti-Euromissiles campaign provided an opportunity to refashion itself as the leading force of the Italian political left. Yet the PCI’s strategy of entering into new alliances was fundamentally flawed; it failed, not so much because organisational inertia within the PCI, but because the party continued to conceive of itself as a vanguard which other groups had to follow. This authoritarian approach not only underestimated the mistrust of all political parties in the Italian peace movement but also misunderstood the sheer centrifugal momentum that the diversity of the various groups provided.

As Lucia Bonfreschi contends in her contribution to this special section, historiography on Italian peace movements is too much focused at present on the dominant presence of either Catholic- or Communist-led movements that were aligned with the DC and the PCI. To broaden the horizon of historical research, Bonfreschi conducts a detailed analysis of the anti-militarism of the Radical Party (Partito Radicale, PR), re-founded in 1967 as a libertarian, anti-authoritarian party that took a pragmatic stance, staying clear of the manifold attempts to create a unified left worldview. It incorporated performative forms of protest such as sit-ins and hunger strikes that it adopted from the New Left in Britain and the US. While some of its members entered parliament only in 1976, the PR was able to exert pressure on the political system and implement reform through the use of referendums as a constitutional mechanism, for instance by tabling a referendum for a bill that recognised conscientious objection to military service, passed by the Italian parliament in 1972. In the late 1960s, while parts of the Italian radical left embraced or tacitly supported violence as a tool for progressive transformation, the PR adopted a stance of strict non-violence. The PR’s anti-militarism also led it early on to a critique of the stance of the PCI and an acknowledgement that the Soviet Bloc also endangered peace. This position was sustained during conflicts over the NATO Double-Track Solution in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the PR deliberately criticised what it regarded as the hypocrisy of the PCI in the face of human rights violations in the Eastern Bloc, not least after the military coup in Poland in 1981. Members of the PR were also highly critical of the ways in which the two main Italian parties, the DC and PCI, tried to exert control over the anti-nuclear mass movement of the early 1980s. They were keen to distinguish their own libertarian anti-militarism from the conventional pacifism of both Catholics and Communists. The continuous presence of the PR’s anti-militarism in Italian peace mobilisation from the 1960s to the 1980s suggests a different periodisation that situates the protests against Euromissiles in a more extended chronology.

Did Southern Europe constitute a distinctive space in terms of peace movement mobilisation? The answer is decidedly negative. Neither did any of the movements in Italy, Spain or Greece formulate the contentious issues that were driving their protests as a shared problem of the European South, nor attempted they specifically to connect to their counterparts in the region. When Italian, Spanish or Greek activists engaged in transnational networks, they established bilateral contacts – as for instance the organisers of the La Ragnatela women’s peace camp in Comiso (Sicily) did with the women who were running the Greenham Common peace camp in the United Kingdom –, or they tapped into existing pan-European organisations such as European Nuclear Disarmament. ⁴³

The case studies in this issue suggest – second – that the conventional chronology of peace mobilisation needs to be revised and expanded. For Western Europe, and here the focus is mostly on the UK and West Germany, the 1960s and most of the 1970s are seen as a largely quiet period, in which the pronounced activism of the late 1950s, exemplified by the founding of CND and Kampf dem Atomtod (Fight against Atomic Death), dwindled, before the 1979 Double-Track Decision kick-started a new cycle of protest. Yet in Italy, Greece and Spain, we see elements of continuity that cut across these caesuras, for instance in the anti-nuclear activism of Edoardo Amaldi that spanned the decades from the 1950s to the 1980s, or in the long-term presence of EEDYE in the Greek context, only violently interrupted by the military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974. The cases of Greece and Spain also demonstrate that, connected to these different chronologies, other issues were at stake that contrast with the dominant focus on the Euromissiles. In both countries, mobilisation for peace was inherently connected to the task of rebuilding civil society after a military dictatorship, as the contributions by Kostis Kornetis and Giulia Quaggio demonstrate. ⁴⁴ Yet Spain also had to deal with the issue of the home-grown violence of the terrorism of the Basque nationalists. In this case, members of the Jesuit order in the Basque country were heavily involved in attempts to develop a theology of non-violence and to apply practical models for mediation and conflict resolution. Indeed, these Jesuits made a somewhat belated, yet sustained contribution to the de-radicalisation of ETA during the 1980s. ⁴⁵

A third observation considers another difference between peace movements in Northern and Southern Europe. In Northern Europe, they were dominated by social democrats and Protestant or Catholic Christians, and focused almost entirely on the issue of nuclear armaments; they were nuclear pacifists in a strict sense, with no substantial interest in abolishing military service or disbanding the army altogether. In Italy and Spain, however, socialist anti-militarism had a crucial presence in the wider framework of the peace movement. In Italy, this current was represented by the Radical Party, which campaigned for the introduction of conscientious objection and for a wider demilitarisation of state and society that went beyond nuclear disarmament. In Spain, the anti-militarist mobilisation was driven by the Movimiento insumiso, the movement for insubordination. With origins that dated back to the final years of the Franco dictatorship, the insumisos campaigned for the abolition of the draft and were ready to endure extended jail sentences when they refused to enlist. ⁴⁶

Overall, the peace movements in Spain, Italy and Greece during the 1970s and 1980s have to be interpreted as an integral part of the wider shift that occurred in European history in the four decades from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War. As the realm of civil society expanded, as the consequences of the total wars of the past and the potential devastation of nuclear annihilation were registered and thought about, and as armaments and the military more generally were seen in connection to issues of democracy and human rights, many people in the South of Europe, as in other parts of the continent, discovered that they ‘hate going to war’, to quote James Sheehan’s phrase. ⁴⁷