Conflicting conceptualisations of ‘democracy’ in the German Bundestag during the anti-nuclear demonstrations, 1995-2001

This is an electronic reprint of the original article. This reprint may differ from the original in pagination and typographic detail. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Please cite the original version: All material supplied via JYX is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of the repository collections is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. You must obtain permission for any other use. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise to anyone who is not an authorised user. Conflicting conceptualisations of ‘democracy’ in the German Bundestag during the anti-nuclear demonstrations, 1995-2001 Kaarkoski, Miina Kaarkoski, M. (2018). Conflicting conceptualisations of ‘democracy’ in the German Bundestag during the anti-nuclear demonstrations, 1995-2001. Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 38(1), 121-133. https://doi.org/10.1080/02606755.2018.1428413 2018 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rper20 Parliaments, Estates and Representation ISSN: 0260-6755 (Print) 1947-248X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rper20 Conflicting conceptualisations of ‘democracy’ in the German Bundestag during the anti-nuclear demonstrations, 1995–2001 Miina Kaarkoski To cite this article: Miina Kaarkoski (2018) Conflicting conceptualisations of ‘democracy’ in the German Bundestag during the anti-nuclear demonstrations, 1995–2001, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 38:1, 121-133, DOI: 10.1080/02606755.2018.1428413 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02606755.2018.1428413 © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 01 Feb 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 51 View related articles View Crossmark data Conflicting conceptualisations of ‘democracy’in the German Bundestag during the anti-nuclear demonstrations, 1995–2001 Miina Kaarkoski Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland SUMMARY A vigorous anti-nuclear movement emerged in Germany in the mid 1990s, when spent nuclear fuel elements began to be transported to the interim storage facility in Gorleben, Lower Saxony. Resistance to nuclear transportation continued to grow in strength throughout the 1990s. The protests expressed people’s distrust and lack of confidence in political institutions and decision-making processes. In the German Bundestag, these events relating to Gorleben caused significant political struggles over the principles and meanings of German democracy. Parliamentarians voiced competing counterarguments about the legitimacy of these demonstrations, on the one hand, and the legitimacy of the nuclear energy policy of the federal government, on the other. Ideas about liberal democracy and the tradition of the 1968 generation and new social movements clashed in the Bundestag. By applying methods of conceptual analysis to parliamentary research, this article discusses conflicting conceptualisations of democracy in the German parliament. Analysis of political language enables discussions on competing ideas, attitudes and conceptions in policy-making. The Bundestag argued about democratic beliefs and values, which legitimated parliamentary policy-making. In particular, interpretations of violence in a democratic state, the principle of majority rule and the legitimacy of decision-making were explicitly debated in the German parliament. KEYWORDS German democracy; Bundestag; parliamentary debates; anti-nuclear movement; radioactive waste Introduction A vigorous anti-nuclear movement arose in Germany in the mid 1990s to resist the transportation of spent nuclear fuel elements to the interim storage facility in Gorleben, Lower Saxony. Three transports from the German nuclear power plants and from the reprocessing plant at La Hague, France, took place during the period 1995–97. After a three-year © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. CONTACT Miina Kaarkoski [email protected] Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland PARLIAMENTS, ESTATES & REPRESENTATION, 2018 VOL. 38, NO. 1, 121–133 https://doi.org/10.1080/02606755.2018.1428413 ban on transports, two transports took place in 2001. 1 The first transport to Gorleben was met with demonstrations of just a few thousand people, whereas the third transport in March 1997 attracted tens of thousands of demonstrators and thirty thousand police officers and Federal Border Guards were in place to keep the peace. 2 The protests were directed at the transports of radioactive waste, but they also expressed people’s distrust and lack of confidence in political institutions and decision-making processes. For leftwing militants in particular, this direct resistance to the transportation was a way to fight against the state, since they considered that nuclear energy policy was perpetuating a system in which the interests of the nuclear industry were promoted at the expense of the well-being of the planet and the general population. 3 The confrontations around the transports of radioactive waste from 1995 onwards culminating in the vicinity of Gorleben, also called Wendland, have a special symbolic significance for the German anti-nuclear movement. Since the late 1970s there had been massive demonstrations and a protest camp against a planned nuclear waste disposal site. 4 From a wider perspective, the events in the 1990s continued in many ways the traditions of the extraparliamentary opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition, APO), the student movement, and the so-called new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s to criticize alleged structural deficiencies in the parliamentary system and an authoritarian-style state. Alongside promoting new ways of life and values, the movements considered themselves to be expressions of a certain conception of democracy that emphasized more opportunities for citizens to participate in decision-making. In Germany the powerful anti-nuclear movement, especially from the second half of the 1970s onwards, was a manifestation of the clash between the citizens participating in the movements and the state. The Green Party, established in 1980, considered itselfatthetimetobetheparliamentaryextensionoftheseextra-parliamentarymovements. 5 The history of the German anti-nuclear movement has been a fairly widely discussed topic among scholars who have already successfully studied the motives of the movement and the criticism it has expressed from various viewpoints: the movement has been motivated by safety issues, but it has also made obvious demands concerning decision-making processes and the principles of democracy. 6 However, the parliamentary aspect of the conflict over nuclear energy has mainly been neglected, 7 despite the fact that since the 1 The first transport was driven in April 1995 from the nuclear power plant Philippsburg, the second transport in May 1996 from the reprocessing plant at La Hague, France, and the third in March 1997 from the nuclear power plants Neckarwesheim and Grundremmingen and from the reprocessing plant La Hague. The fourth was driven in March 2001 and the fifth in November 2001. Both were from La Hague. 2 M. Edler, Demonstranten als ‘Staatsfeinde’–‘Staat’als Feinbild? Bürgerinitiative, Medien und Staatsgewalt im Streit um die Castor-Transporte in das Atom-Zwischenlager Gorleben (Lüchow, 2001), pp. 75, 81, 87. 3 B. Blank, ‘Der Protest gegen CASTOR-Transporte und die Rolle der Linksextremisten’,Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie 10, (1998), pp. 205–6. 4 J. Radkau and L. Hahn, Aufstieg und Fall der deutschen Atomwirtschaft (Munich, 2013), pp. 304–6, 325; J. Radkau, ‘Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Antiatomkraftbewegung’,Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte: Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament 61, (2011), p. 11. 5 K.-W. Brand, D. Büsser and D. Rucht, Aufbruch in eine andere Gesellschaft. Neue soziale Bewegungen in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt, 1983), pp. 63, 86, 93, 99, 104. 6 For example, J. Radkau, Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft 1945–1975. Verdrängte Alternativen in der Kerntechnik und der Ursprung der nuklearen Kontroverse (Hamburg, 1983); D. Rucht, ‘Anti-Atomkraftbewegung’, in R. Roland and R. Dieter (eds), Die sozialen Bewegungen in Deutschland seit 1945: ein Handbuch (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), pp. 245–66; A.S. Tompkins, Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany (Oxford, 2016). 7 The Commission of Inquiry ‘Future Nuclear Energy Policy’(1979) has been studied by Cornelia Altenburg and the parliamentary debates about nuclear energy policy in 1991–2001 by Miina Kaarkoski. C. Altenburg, Kernenergie und Politikberatung. Die Vermessung einer Kontroverse (Wiesbaden, 2010); M. Kaarkoski, ‘Energiemix’versus ‘Energiewende’: Competing Conceptualisations of Nuclear Energy Policy in the German Parliamentary Debates of 1991–2001 (Jyväskylä, 2016). 122 M. KAARKOSKI Chernobyl accident (1986), the political parties in the Bundestag have argued vehemently on the question of the further use of nuclear energy. 8 By studying the debates of the German federal parliament, the Bundestag, on the transportation of radioactive waste to Gorleben and the ensuing demonstrations in 1995–2001, this article illustrates how these events caused significant political struggles over the meaning of German democracy in the parliamentary sphere. This was because two traditions of German democratic thought collided in the situation: the tradition based on constitutional emphasis of liberal democracy in the sense of parliamentary representation and the rule of law, and the tradition of the 1968 generation and new social movements challenging the political institutions and the elite. 9 Dirk Jörke and Marcus Llanque conclude that at least up to the end of the 1980s, the liberal conception of parliamentarism dominated German discussion, although in the context of the new social movements there was harsh criticism of parliamentary democracy. 10 As shall be seen in the following empirical sections, the tradition of parliamentary, representative democracy, supported by the Christian Democrats, the Liberals and the majority of the Social Democrats, was challenged by the Green MPs (Abgeordnete), who promoted the values and ideas of the protest generation. This generation, as Andreas Biefang and Andreas Schulz point out, had the tradition of claiming to unmask parliamentarism as a mere superficial democratic performance to mask the ‘true’(i.e. economic) power structures. 11 The analysis applies methods of conceptual analysis to parliamentary research, presenting a macro-level semantic and micro-level pragmatic analysis of political language. 12 In this historical case study, both macro-level long-term manifestations of conceptions of democracy and micro-level speech acts by individual MPs were considered. Discussions on the meanings of German democracy and parliamentarism have long traditions, 13 and the parliamentary debates of the period studied drew on past political experiences. Debates were based on longstanding traditions in German democratic and parliamentary thought and speeches by MPs served to reveal the competing beliefs and values of the political parties. Simultaneously, speeches about German democracy obviously also fulfilled a pragmatic function in promoting certain political aims or pleasing the electorate. In the following empirical sections, I shall first discuss how democracy was viewed in the context of the events of 1995–97. I then present a discussion on how the debates about German democracy evolved, when the question of transports of radioactive waste became a matter of foreign relations in 1998–2001. 8 Kaarkoski, ‘Energiemix’, pp. 16–17. 9 P.M.R. Stirk, Twentieth-century German Political Thought (Oxford, 2005), p. 136; I. Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er Bewegung: Deutschland - Westeuropa - USA (Munich, 2001); P.A. Richter, ‘Die Ausserparlamentarische Opposition in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1966 bis 1968’, in I. Gilcher-Holtey (ed.), 1968 - vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen, 1998), pp. 35–55. 10 D. Jörke and M. Llanque, ‘Parliamentarism and Democracy in German Political Theory since 1848’, in P. Ihalainen, C. Ilie and K. Palonen (eds), Parliament and Parliamentarism: A Comparative History of a European Concept (New York, 2016), p. 274. 11 A. Biefang and A. Schulz, ‘From Monarchial Constitutionalism to a Parliamentary Republic: Concepts of Parliamentarism in Germany since 1818’, in Ihalainen et al. (eds), Parliament, p. 74. 12 P. Ihalainen, Agents of the People. Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in British and Swedish Parliamentary and Public Debates, 1734–1800 (Leiden, 2010); C. Ilie, ‘Parliamentary Discourse and Deliberative Rhetoric’, in Ihalainen et al. (eds), Parliament, pp. 133–45; T. Häkkinen, The Royal Prerogative Redefined. Parliamentary Debate on the Role of the British Parliament in Large-scale Military Deployments, 1982–2003 (Jyväskylä, 2014); Kaarkoski, ‘Energiemix’; K. Palonen, ‘Speaking pro et contra: The Rhetorical Intelligibility of Parliamentary Politics and the Political Intelligibility of Parliamentary Rhetoric’,in S. Soininen and T. Turkka (eds), The Parliamentary Style of Politics (Helsinki, 2008), pp. 82–105. 13 Biefang and Schulz, ‘From Monarchial Constitutionalism’, pp. 62–80; Jörke and Llanque, ‘Parliamentarism’, pp. 262–76. PARLIAMENTS, ESTATES & REPRESENTATION 123 The use of violence in a democratic state In the federal parliament, the main issue giving rise to tensions was the use of violence by the state and also by its citizens. According to Max Weber’s highly influential definition, the modern state can be defined in terms of the specific means peculiar to it: a state is a human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. The right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent which the state permits it. 14 Even though this state monopoly on the use of force and, hence, the very existence of the state, were not as such contested in the Bundestag, the political parties disagreed on how to protect the democratic state in the prevailing situation, where use of force by the police and people competed with each other. For the Christian Democrats and Liberals in particular, safeguarding the democratic state meant respecting policy legitimized via representative institutions and deploring physical or verbal violence of any kind. In the period 1995–98 the ruling coalition composed of the CDU/CSU (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands/Christlich- Soziale Union in Bayern) and FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei) and the federal ministers constantly highlighted how nuclear energy policy and radioactive waste disposal policy had been agreed on by a parliamentary majority and legislated via representative institutions. The federal government, therefore, saw no legal reasons for preventing the transportation when all the preconditions required for allowing them were met. The Federal Minister of the Environment, Nature Conservation and Reactor Safety, Angela Merkel, in particular argued constantly for the safety of these transports and questioned the justification for protesting against transports in society or in the Bundestag. 15 Merkel’s personal background becomes evident in her speeches about nuclear energy. She was educated as a physicist and, in contrast to many other prominent politicians of the 1990s who were involved in the discussions about nuclear energy (such as Gerhard Schröder, Joseph ‘Joschka’Fischer and Jürgen Trittin), she was from the former East Germany. She therefore did not have the same background as the ‘protest generation’of the 1960s and 1970s in the former West Germany. 16 In April 1995 Michaele Hustedt (Alliance 90/The Greens) suggested that Merkel was actually missing the meaning of the debate by criticizing Merkel’s lack of knowledge about the role of the anti-nuclear movement in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. 17 The question of the legitimacy of the protest movements around the transports to Gorleben divided opinion in the Bundestag. MPs of all parties voiced arguments on how respecting the fundamental rights of ‘freedom to demonstrate’and ‘freedom of speech’ were a core feature of German democracy. In political theory, these fundamental rights have been considered as the key means to safeguard the rights of minorities to express opinions or criticism in a parliamentary system based on the principle of majority rule. 18 In the Bundestag, it even appeared to be some kind of ritual in parliamentary speeches to acknowledge respect for these democratic principles even though the speaker’s 14 M. Weber, ‘Politik als Beruf’,Zeno.org, pp. 505–10, http://www.zeno.org/Soziologie/M/Weber,+Max/Schriften+zur +Politik/Politik+als+Beruf. 15 Merkel Deutscher Bundestag (DB) 33. sitting 26 April 1995, p. 2518. 16 Kaarkoski, ‘Energiemix’, pp. 42, 58, 81. 17 Hustedt DB 33. sitting 26 April 1995, p. 2526. 18 C. Gusy, ‘Das Mehrheitsprinzip im demokratischen Staat’, in B. Guggenberg and C. Offe (eds), An den Grenzen der Mehrheitsdemokratie. Politik und Soziologie der Mehrheitsregel (Opladen, 1984), pp. 61–2, 65, 74–6. 124 M. KAARKOSKI argument might thereafter condemn the present form of demonstrations. For example, in a speech in April 1995, Merkel praised Germany for respecting these principles allowing people ‘to assemble, to protest and to demonstrate’. However, she then argued how these rights only applied under a premise of non-violence, since otherwise ‘democracy will soon come to an end’. 19 The Bundestag speeches about the people’s willingness to engage in violence in demonstrations illustrated the ambiguity surrounding the concepts of ‘violence’and ‘non-vio- lence’. Bettina Blank has pointed out how the concept of non-violence was understood differently in the movement opposed to the transportation: this principle of non-violence was widely shared in society, but it might include all kinds of actions, at least against material property. 20 In the Bundestag the use of violence by citizens was universally condemned, yet the MPs disagreed as to what actually constituted non-violence. The CDU/ CSU and FDP had the strictest attitude against any kind of physical acts. The representatives of these ruling parties clearly emphasized the viewpoint according to which violent acts by protestors against material property totally precluded the legitimacy of the demonstrations. From this perspective, the monopoly on the use of force belonged unequivocally to the state, and when using police force to secure the transportation the state was fulfilling its democratic obligation to ensure safety and peace in society. Speakers of the CDU/CSU and FDP rejected the representative aspect of these demonstrations as a form of expressing the will of the majority of the people, as the opposition parties claimed. 21 These examples above already illustrate and the following sections continue to discuss how the principle of the rule of the majority was likewise a contested issue in parliament. For the Christian Democrats and Liberals, respecting the right of the parliamentary majority to legitimate policy decisions was a practical means of safeguarding democracy by promoting stability and peace in society against the parties’historically based fears of failing or unworkable democracy. 22 For the parties, following the constitutional expression of representative democracy seemed to have been a way to prevent the rise of populism, fascism and authoritarianism. The Social Democrats clearly condemned the use of violence in any form as a political tool, but the party representatives considered sit-in blocks, for example, to be legitimate. In fact, the Federal Constitutional Court was involved in this debate, and representatives of the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) referred to its ruling according to which sit-in blocks were a legitimate way of protesting. However, it is noteworthy that the political aim of the Social Democrats in the Bundestag was first and foremost to challenge the content of nuclear energy policy and spent fuel disposal policy drawn up by the cabinet of Helmut Kohl instead of questioning the functions of German liberal representative democracy as such. 23 At its 1986 party conference in Nuremberg, the SPD had taken a decision to support the phasing out of nuclear energy within 10 years. However, this decision was less ideological than the Green Party’s anti-nuclear position. 24 19 Merkel DB 33. sitting 26 April 1995, pp. 2518–19. 20 Blank, ‘Der Protest’, pp. 199–213. 21 Teiser (CDU/CSU), Lippold (CDU/CSU) and Rexrodt (FDP) DB 33. sitting 26 April 1995, pp. 2522, 2534, 2561. 22 Stirk, Twentieth-century German Political Thought, pp. 136, 174–5. 23 Müller (SPD) and Schütz (SPD) DB 33. sitting 26 April 1995, pp. 2521, 2546; Kubatschka (SPD) DB 97. sitting 17 April 1996, pp. 8640–8641; Ganseforth (SPD) DB 104. sitting 9 May 1996, p. 9126. 24 Kaarkoski, ‘Energiemix’, p. 16. PARLIAMENTS, ESTATES & REPRESENTATION 125 The Greens’attitude towards civil disobedience and the state’s use of force against its citizens was based on the tradition of the social movements of the past decades vis-à-vis democracy. The party has traditionally understood itself as the parliamentary extension of the extra-parliamentary movements, and it aims to promote a more open democracy by emphasizing grassroots democracy and civil disobedience as supplementary to the parliamentary system. 25 The representatives of the Green Party also formally condemned the use of violence, but their argumentation about the topic was significantly more controversial. From their perspective, the (violent) demonstrators were not the real problem. What was problematic was rather the situation in which the state, which claimed to be democratic, was actually using police force to back up policy decisions against the will of the people expressed in the demonstrations. For example, Michaele Hustedt argued in April 1995, ‘In this country it is impossible to reach acceptance of atomic power with such extensive police action.’ 26 This criticism of the use of police force in implementing policy decisions was closely related to the argumentation about the so-called ‘atomic state’(Atomstaat), which articulated the fundamental reason why the German anti-nuclear movement had been fighting against nuclear energy continuously and enthusiastically. The anti-nuclear movement feared that because of the risks of nuclear technology, the state was forced to use extreme power over its own citizens and to compromise on the principles of democracy in order to manage the risk inherent in the technology. 27 Therefore the concept of the atomic state connected the use of nuclear power with questions about the meaning and realization of German democracy. The concept referred to the original form of nuclear technology –the atomic bomb –with all its negative connotations and fears. 28 Robert Jungk’s book Der Atomstaat, published in 1977, speculated about the consequences of large-scale technology being used by the state and the book sealed the success of the concept. 29 In the Bundestag Ursula Schönberger (Alliance 90/The Greens) was a special advocate of the emergence of this dystopian-style atomic state that did not respect democratic principles. On 26 April 1995, Schönberger drew a parallel with Jungk’s work and the first transport to Gorleben: Yesterday the atomic state foretold by Robert Jungk came true: 6500 police officers accompanied one transport, private land was occupied by the police, some random arrests were made. The right to demonstrate was withheld for days. Water cannons used against non-violent demonstrators are the face of this atomic state.You have brought the first castor transport to the interim storage facility, but at what price? Using the largest police escort ever used in the FRG at a cost of 55 million DM per castor, and going at a walking pace. 30 25 W. Ismayr, ‘Die GRÜNEN im Bundestag: Parlamentarisierung und Basisanbindung’,Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen 16, (1985), p. 300; H. Fogt, ‘Basisdemokratie oder Herrschaft der Aktivisten? Zum Politikverständnis der Grünen’,Politische Vierteljahresschrift 25, (1984), pp. 97–114. 26 Hustedt DB 33. sitting 26 April 1995, p. 2526. 27 Kaarkoski, ‘Energiemix’, p. 176. 28 M. Jung, Öffentlichkeit und Sprachwandel. Zur Geschichte des Diskurses über die Atomenergie (Opladen, 1994), pp. 96, 103– 8; Radkau and Hahn, Aufstieg, p. 11. 29 R. Jungk, Der Atomstaat. Vom Fortschritt in die Unmenschlichkeit (Munich, 1977). 30 Schönberger DB 33. sitting 26 April 1995, p. 2543. 126 M. KAARKOSKI A year later, on 9 May 1996, Schönberger drew attention to the state’s use of force in the past few days by saying: ‘The atomic state means that those who favour nuclear energy are forced, due to its potential risks, to push it through with all the power a state can use against its own citizens.’ 31 From the viewpoint of the Green MPs, events around Gorleben represented the impossibility of continuing to use nuclear energy and execute the waste disposal policy without changing the role of the state into something quite undemocratic. The contested principle of parliamentary majority In the parliamentary debates of the case under discussion, another pivotal issue causing tensions was the different perceptions of the principle of majority rule in democratic decision-making processes. Political theory has noted how the principle of majority rule is fundamental to modern democratic states, since it holds the political entity together, also in the cases when individuals do not agree with the decisions. In parliamentary democracy, the basic idea is that the majority of the elected parliament also represents the majority of the citizens. 32 Further, majority democracy requires certain consensus about the acceptance of the political majority (also by the minority) and the rights and limits of concrete decisions made by the majority. 33 The principle of majority rule derives its legitimacy, for example, from the existence and control of political opposition. 34 However, since the citizens’movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a growing number of citizens no longer appeared to be unequivocally willing to consider the decisions of the parliamentary majority as legitimate. The Green Party in particular advocated grassroots democracy in order to deny the right of the parliamentary majority for decision-making purely on its own and to demand wider involvement of the citizens in the decision-making processes. 35 For example, Dieter Rucht observed how the use of civil disobedience and resistance affected conceptions of representative democracy; protesting groups considered their actions necessary in order to achieve some greater legally protected rights. 36 Instead of the majority principle, the people involved in the movements then highlighted the ‘principle of consensus’that would produce a decision that all those involved could agree with. 37 There were many speeches by the Green MPs in which they described situations when people could legitimately use civil disobedience to object to decisions made according to the principle of parliamentary majority rule. The Greens considered that the prevailing situation was such as to legitimize civil disobedience, since the democratic role of the state was endangered by the state’s own actions as discussed above. These speeches utilized historical examples of the extra-parliamentary opposition and citizens’movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and their alleged achievements for German democracy. The most 31 Schönberger DB 104. sitting 9 May 1996, p. 9123. 32 H.J. Varain, ‘Die Bedeutung des Mehrheitsprinzips’, in Guggenberger and Offe (eds), An den Grenzen, pp. 48–53. 33 B. Guggenberger and C. Offe, ‘Politik aus der Basis - Herausforderung der parliamentarischen Mehrheitsdemokratie’,in Guggenberger and Offe (eds), An den Grenzen, pp. 9–10. 34 Gusy, ‘Das Mehrheitsprinzip’, pp. 61–2, 65, 74–6. 35 H. Abromeit, ‘Mehrheitprinzip und Föderalismus’, in Guggenberger and Offe (eds), An den Grenzen, p. 132; B. Guggenberger, ‘An den Grenzen der Mehrheitsdemokratie’, in Guggenberger and Offe (eds), An den Grenzen, pp. 184, 191; D. Rucht, ‘Recht auf Widerstand? Aktualität, Legitimität und Grenzen “zivilen Ungehorsams”’, in Guggenberger and Offe (eds), An den Grenzen, 255. 36 Rucht, ‘Recht’, p. 261. 37 W. Sternstein, ‘Keine Macht für niemand!’In Guggenberger and Offe (eds), An den Grenzen, p. 282. PARLIAMENTS, ESTATES & REPRESENTATION 127