A quantum of solace? European peace movements during the Cold War and their elective affinities

The article discusses the European dimension of antinuclear protests in Europe during the Cold War. In conceptual terms, explanations of peace movement mobilisation during the early 1980s as result of a value change to post-materialist values are criticised. Contrary to this interpretation, peace activists, in particular women’s peace protests, stressed the material shortcomings they faced as a results of expenditure on nuclear armaments. In terms of their European character, antinuclear activists during the first mobilisation wave until 1963 developed substantial transnational contacts, but kept an orientation towards their nation as an identity space. During the campaign against the Euromissiles in the early 1980s, an increasingly dense network of elective affinities according to – for instance – denomination or professional expertise emerged. Attempts to connect peace activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain in a ›détente from below‹, however, eere hampered by practical problems and divergent perceptions of the political situation. Even while movement activists interacted and coordinated their efforts across national borders, they did not simply merge into a European civil society. Antinuclear peace movement activists, the article argues, did not constitute a European subject

The Gospel of Psychology: Therapeutic Concepts and the Scientification of Pastoral Care in the West German Catholic Church, 1945-1980

As Friedrich Wilhelm Graf has argued, any thorough assessment of religious change in the twentieth century has to pay attention to the interplay between the established churches and social forces in fields of society as different as the media, the economy, the arts, and the sciences. It is the aim of this article to stress both the emergence and the importance of hybrids between organized religion and the human sciences in the decades since the 1950s. I take the Catholic Church in the Federal Republic as a perhaps somewhat unlikely but also illuminating example, although all major Christian denominations both in Germany and in other Western European countries have made ample use of social science methods such as statistics, sociology, and opinion-polling during that period. From the broad range of scientific approaches employed by the Catholic Church, the focus of this article is on the use of psychological techniques used for purposes of therapeutic intervention, or, in Anglo-Saxon parlance, counseling. The emerging psychologization of religious topics and pastoral action is seen as merely one example of the immense significance that the “psy disciplines” of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychology have attained within the forms of knowledge and practice deployed to describe the “Self.” This process can also be interpreted as a particularly striking example of the “scientification of the social” in the twentieth century, that is, of the process in which human science concepts have shaped new terms and categories for the description of social contexts and offered forms of practical intervention in social problems

Meinungsumfragen in der Konkurrenzdemokratie: Auswirkungen der Demoskopie auf die Volksparteien und den politischen Massenmarkt 1945/49-1990

Das Forschungsprojekt 'Meinungsumfragen in der Konkurrenzdemokratie. Der Aufstieg der Umfrageforschung und seine Auswirkungen auf die Parteien und den politischen Massenmarkt 1945/49-1990' versucht, Fragen der politischen Geschichte unter strukturellen Bedingungen aufzuwerfen, um die Einrichtung und die Durchführung von Umfragen bei den politischen Parteien in der Bundesrepublik zu beschreiben. Die drei Dimensionen von 'politics', 'polity' und 'policy' werden herangezogen, um den Einfluss der Instrumente der Umfrageforschung auf das praktische Denken und den diskursiven Wortlaut der Politik am Beispiel der beiden Volksparteien SPD und CDU zu analysieren. (ICIÜbers)'The research project 'public opinion polling in a democracy: the rise of survey research and its effects an political parties and the political mass market 1945/49-1990' tries to draw upon questions of political history in structural terms in order to describe the establishment and use of polling by political parties in the FRG. The three dimensions of politics, polity and policy are taken into account to analyse the influence of the instruments of survey research an practical reasoning and discoursive wording of politics at the example of the two mass parties SPD and CDU.' (author's abstract