Articles

Thinking Globally, Acting (Trans-)Locally: Petra Kelly and the Transnational Roots of West German Green Politics

Stephen Milder^a1

^a1 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Thousands of demonstrators crowded Trafalgar Square on a chilly April afternoon in 1978 to protest the planned expansion of nuclear fuel reprocessing operations at the Windscale Reactor in rural Cumbria. Toward the end of the rally, a young woman faced the mass of protestors from behind the podium. “I am here to bring you greetings of solidarity from the various European, Australian, and Japanese anti-nuclear movements,” she announced. She explained that the movements whose greetings she brought to London represented “a great wave of transnational determination to put a stop to Windscale, to put a stop to a nuclearized, militarized Europe.” Within the next few moments, she described the contours of this “transnational wave.” She took her audience from Aboriginal territory in Australia, where Green Ban strikes interfered with uranium mining, to the nonviolent demonstrations against reactor construction in German villages, and back to Windscale, where protesters demanded a stop to nuclear fuel reprocessing. In the few minutes she stood at the podium, Petra Kelly narrated an around-the-world journey that had taken her most of the previous two decades to complete.

Stephen Milder is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Department of History, Hamilton Hall, CB # 3195, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3195; email: smilder@unc.edu). His dissertation project focuses on the growth of the West German anti-nuclear movement during the 1970s.

Footnotes

I would like to thank the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for the generous “German Studies Research Grant” that enabled me to conduct research for this article in Berlin during the summer of 2007. In addition, I would like to thank Robert Camp at the Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis for helping me navigate Petra Kelly's vast papers.