The way is the goal: Ideology and the practice of collectivist democracy in German new social movements.

Abstract

Social movement theory has acknowledged but not yet adequately explained how similarly situated social movement organizations sometimes adopt very different organizational structures, tactics, and deliberative practices. Building on recent, more culturally inflected work, my dissertation examines how ideology shapes these preferences through an analysis of two competing organizational currents within Germany's vibrant new social movement sector. Over the last thirty years, extraparliamentary activism in Germany has given rise to two divergent democratic countercultures, both deeply committed to a non-hierarchical, collectivist-democratic style of politics. One has roots in the Gandhian tradition of radical nonviolence; the other in the anti-authoritarian autonomous movement (known as the <italic>Autonomen</italic>). The autonomous and nonviolence movements have developed contrasting forms of collectivist democracy, marked by different ways of dividing labor and running meetings, different decision-making processes, and different tactical orientations. Given that both countercultures exist within the same political-economic regime, have the same class base, and face the same political opportunity structures, my dissertation attempts to account for the development of these distinct countercultures and their specialized organizational forms through an in-depth, comparative analysis of six collectivist groups from each counterculture, located throughout the country and varying in size, age, and issue orientation. On the basis of two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 63 semi-structured interviews with a matched sample of activists from each counterculture, my analysis shows that the development of what I call the <italic>organic</italic> and <italic>mechanistic</italic> forms of collectivist democratic structure is tied to differences in their political ideologies. More specifically, their divergent organizational practices grew out of competing understandings within each tradition of their own core concepts, i.e. autonomy and nonviolence. The way in which the groups dealt with tensions that arose between these competing understandings within their respective ideological systems proved to be a critical factor shaping their contrasting organizational practices. This suggests that the relationship between ideology and social movement practice is conditioned by both the <italic>content</italic> and the <italic>structure</italic> of particular ideologies; choices of organizational structure, tactics, and deliberative practices arise out of attempts not only to reconcile ideals with the demands of practical circumstances, but also to reconcile contradictory elements <italic> within</italic> each group's ideological system.