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 Social movements, political violence, and the state

The rise of social movements in the late 1960s in the industrialized West posed
compelling questions for social science: Why did political conflicts radicalize pre-
cisely in those societies that seemed to have been pacified by the promises of the
welfare state and the institutionalization of the labor conflict? Why did a generation
socialized to politics in the calm and affluence of the early sixties resort to vio-
lence? Why, in the "First World," were police forces ordered to fire on political
demonstrators?
This book presents empirical research on the nature and structure of political
violence. While most studies of social movements focus on single-nation studies,
Donatella della Porta uses a comparative research design to analyze movements
in two countries - Italy and Germany - from the 1960s to the 1990s. Through
extensive use of official documents and in-depth interviews, della Porta explains
the actors' construction of external political reality. The empirical data are used
to build a middle-range theory on political violence that incorporates an analysis
of the interactions between social movements and the state at the macro-level, an
analysis of the development of radical organizations as entrepreneurs for political
violence at the meso-level, and an analysis of the construction of "militant" iden-
tities and countercultures at the micro-level.
By studying the social movement families from within which violence emerges,
linking social movements to institutions, and, finally, providing a systematic anal-
ysis - firmly grounded in history - of the nature of political violence, the author
has created a masterful synthesis that will help secure a place for the study of
political violence in the study of systemwide politics.
 CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS

General editor
PETER LANGE Duke University

Associate editors
ELLEN COMISSO University of California, San Diego
PETER HALL Harvard University
JOEL MIGDAL University of Washington
HELEN MILNER Columbia University
RONALD ROGOWSKI University of California, Los Angeles
SIDNEY TARROW Cornell University

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Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue State Power and Social Forces:
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 Social movements, political
violence, and the state
A comparative analysis of Italy and Germany

DONATELLA DELLA PORTA

University of Florence

CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www. Cambridge. org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521473965

© Cambridge University Press 1995

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1995

This digitally printed first paperback version 2006

A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

della Porta, Donatella, 1956-
Social movements, political violence, and the state : a
comparative analysis of Italy and Germany / Donatella della Porta.
p. cm. - (Cambridge studies in comparative politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-521-47396-9
1. Violence - Italy. 2. Violence - Germany. 3. Social movements-
Italy. 4. Social movements — Germany. 5. Italy — Politics and
government - 1945- 6. Germany - Politics and government - 1945-1990.
I. Title. II. Series.
HN490.V5D43 1995
306.2 - dc20 94-47636
CIP

ISBN-13 978-0-521-47396-5 hardback

ISBN-10 0-521-47396-9 hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-02979-7 paperback

ISBN-10 0-521-02979-1 paperback
 Contents

Foreword SIDNEY TARROW page vii

List of abbreviations ix
Preface xiii

1 Comparative research on political violence 1

Social science and political violence 2
The rationale of a comparative study of Italy and Germany 14
The plan of this book 21

2 Political violence in Italy and Germany: a periodization 23

Movement families, cycles of protest, and violence 23
Protest and violence in Italy: 1960-90 25
Protest and violence in Germany: 1960-90 36
A comparison of political violence in Italy and Germany 47
Social movements, protest, and violence: some first
observations 50

3 Violence and the political system: the policing of protest 55

Protest policing as a barometer of political opportunities:
an introduction 55
The policing of protest in Italy 58
The policing of protest in Germany 63
Comparing styles of protest policing 69
Political opportunities and protest policing 71
Escalation and de-escalation: the consequences of protest
policing 78
Protest policing: a summary 80

4 Organizational processes and violence in social movements 83

Organizational processes and radicalization 83
vi Contents
Radical organizations in Italy 85
Radical organizations in Germany 95
Radicalization and organizational resources 104
Radicalization and environmental resources 108
Interactions and radicalization: on competition and
4
'perverse effects " 109
Organizational dynamics: a summary 111

5 The logic of underground organizations 113

Organizational model: deeper and deeper underground 115
The selection of targets: from propaganda to survival 119
Terrorist repertoires: from demonstrative actions to "war" 124
Ideological messages: instruments for "internal consumption" 129
Intrinsic dynamics: an explanation of organizational evolution
in the underground 134

6 Patterns of radicalization in political activism 136

Two life histories 137
Political countercultures 149
Movements and countermovements: spirals of violence 152
Encounters with an "unfair" state 158
Radicalization in political activism: a summary and
comparison 161

7 Individual commitment in the underground 165

Recruitment in the underground 166
"Freedom fighters": identities in the underground 170
Group dynamics in the underground 177
Individual commitment in the underground: a comparative
summary 182

8 Social movements, political violence, and the state: a conclusion 187

Political opportunities for violence 188
Entrepreneurs of violence 195
Collective identities and violence 201
Macro-, meso-, and micro-dynamics: a final comparison 207
On generalizing the results of the cross-national study 209

Notes 111
Bibliography 235
Index 261
 Foreword

SIDNEY TARROW

Donatella della Porta's Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State
crosses four important thresholds in the comparative study of political conflict:
the violence/social movement threshold, the movement/institutions threshold, the
comparative politics/sociology threshold, and the history/social science thresh-
old.
Beginning with the attacks on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, a
virtual cottage industry of terrorist studies developed. Rooted in the international
system, largely innocent of theoretical apparatus, and often conflating terrorism
with other forms of violent conflict, these studies produced much new knowl-
edge, but drew little on the social movement field that was undergoing a ren-
aissance at the same time. The first major virtue of della Porta's book is that
she has grounded her analysis of political violence in Italy and Germany in both
European and American social movement theory. This allows her to show how
the organized violence of the 1970s and 1980s in these two countries related to
the social movements that appeared during the previous decade.
Della Porta's second contribution is to root the study of social movements
within political institutions. Research on social movements languished in the
backwaters of sociology and social psychology until the late 1960s and was
largely ignored by political scientists. But the flowering of the civil rights and
student movements in the United States and of the "new" social movements
of Western Europe in the 1970s led to a resurgence and "normalization" of
this field. Delia Porta situates her study in this tradition, relating the movements
she studies to the political process. In particular, she uses the key concept of
the structure of political opportunity to show how some of the movements that
emerged in the late 1960s were integrated within the political process, while
others gravitated toward political violence.
Not only that: della Porta enlarges the focus of the political process approach
to the state and to its most relevant contributor to the dynamics of political
violence - the police. Following Tilly's injunction that a movement is a sus-
tained interaction between challengers and opponents, she focuses on how the
viii Foreword
repertoire of the movements and the tactics of the police affect one another,
and how each is affected by the balance between civil rights-oriented groups
and law and order-oriented groups. Much of the difference in the frequency and
strategies of politically violent groups in the two countries is explained by this
intersection between the police and protesters.
Delia Porta also makes an original contribution to the intersection between
political sociology and comparative politics. In the past, the social movement
field was largely built on one-nation case studies (and that nation was almost
always the United States), while studies of comparative politics were mainly
occupied with the study of formal institutions. Delia Porta's book will help to
break down this boundary. By choosing two similar cases - Italy and Germany
- both of which emerged from defeat in World War II and were building new
democracies at the time when widespread social insurgency appeared, and by
using a variety of methods drawn from political sociology and comparative
politics, she builds an effective bridge between these two fields.
One of the methods she employs relates the organizational ecology of terrorist
organizations to the movements' life histories. Rather than interpreting terrorism
as the result of personal deviance, she sees it as a possible outcome of a tree
of possibilities resulting from organizational choices and constraints. Thus, just
as not every movement becomes violent, not every violent movement gives rise
to a clandestine terrorist organization. Perhaps the signal contribution of the
book is to add an organizational perspective to the analysis of the dynamics of
violent political movements.
The fourth contribution of the book is to situate the study of collective action
within history. In recent years, many political scientists have turned their atten-
tion to collective action, building upon public choice theory. Although this
strand of theory has led to significant advances in knowledge, its distance from
history has made it somewhat abstract and, at times, disembodied. Delia Porta's
book shows that research on social movements and political violence can be
both theoretical and in history. She not only traces the rise and dynamics of
organized violence in these two countries from the 1960s through the 1980s,
but roots her findings in the larger political developments of each system since
World War II.
In situating her study of political violence, first, among the social movement
families from within which violence emerges, then in relating social movements
to institutions, and, finally, in providing a systematic analysis of what we know
about violence - much of which she herself has contributed - Donatella della
Porta has produced a masterful synthesis that will help to secure the place of
the study of political violence and social movements squarely within the field
of the systematic study of politics.
 Abbreviations

AO Avanguardia Operaia (Workers' Vanguard)

APO AuBerparlamentarische Opposition (Extra-Parliamentary Oppo-
sition)
AStA Allgemeiner Studenten Ausschuss (General Committee of Stu-
dents)
B2J Bewegung 2. Juni (Movement of the Second of June)
BC Brigate Comuniste (Communist Brigades)
BKA Bundeskriminalamt
BR Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades)
CC Comitati Comunisti (Communist Committees)
CCPO Comitati Comunisti per il Potere Operaio (Communist Com-
mittees for the Workers' Power)
CDU Christlich-Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union)
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CPM Collettivo Politico Metropolitano (Political Metropolitan Collec-
tive)
CPO Collettivo Politico Operaio (Workers' Political Collective)
CPOS Collettivo Politico Operai e Studenti (Workers' and Students'
Political Collective)
CSU Christlich-Soziale Union (Christian Social Union)
DC Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy)
DKP Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (German Communist Party)
FAC Formazioni Armate Combattenti (Armed Fighting Formations)
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FCC Formazioni Comuniste Combattenti (Communist Fighting For-
mations)
FDP Freie Demokratische Partei (Liberal Democratic Party)
FGCI Federazione Giovanile Comunista Italiana (Italian Communist
Youth Federation)
FRG Federal Republic of Germany
 Abbreviations
GDR German Democratic Republic
Jusos Jungsozialisten (Young Socialists)
K-Gruppen Kommunistische Gruppen (Communist Groups)
KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Ger-
many)
LC Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle)
MCR Movimento Comunista Rivoluzionario (Communist Revolution-
ary Movement)
MS Movimento Studentesco (Student Movement)
MSI Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement)
NAP Nuclei Armati Proletari (Armed Proletarian Nuclei)
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NPD Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Demo-
cratic Party of Germany)
OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
PAC Proletari Armati per il Comunismo (Armed Proletarians for
Communism)
PCI Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party)
PCIml Partito Comunista Italiano marxista leninista (Italian Communist
Marxist-Leninist Party)
PdUP Partito di Unita Proletaria (Proletarian Unity Party)
PFLP Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
PL Prima Linea (Front Line)
PO Potere Operaio (Workers' Power)
POS Political Opportunity Structure
PSI Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party)
PSIUP Partito Socialista Italiano di Unita Proletaria (Italian Socialist
Party for the Proletarian Unity)
RAF Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction)
RC Republikanischer Club (Republican Club)
RCA Reparti Comunisti d'Attacco (Communist Unities for the At-
tack)
RH Rote Hilfe (Red Help)
RZ Revolutionaren Zellen (Revolutionary Cells)
SDS (American) Students for a Democratic Society
SDS (German) Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist
German Student League)
SH Schwarze Hilfe (Black Help)
SMO Social Movement Organization
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic
Party of Germany)
SPK Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv (Socialist Collective of Pa-
tients)
 Abbreviations xi
UCC Unita Comuniste Combattenti (Communist Fighting Units)
UCIml Unione dei Comunisti Italiani marxisti leninisti (Union of the
Italian Marxist-Leninist Communists)
UGI Unione Goliardica Italiana (Italian Goliardic Union)
UNURI Unione Nazionale Universitaria Rappresentativa Italiana (Italian
National Universitarian Representative Union)
For Herbert
 Preface

West Berlin, June 2, 1967. An official visit in Germany by the Shah of Iran and
his wife coincided with the peak of a long-lasting student mobilization. Because
of rumors of a possible attack against the Shah, the federal government declared
the "highest security level." The state government mobilized 4,240 policemen
to guarantee the security of the guests. Since the early morning, organizations
of Iranian refugees and student groups had staged protests everywhere the im-
perial couple was expected to appear during its Berlin visit. Several times during
the day, demonstrators and the Shah's supporters - later said to be organized
by the Iranian secret services - clashed with each other, and the police charged
the demonstrators. The first confrontations took place in front of the city hall.
About four hundred protestors carrying placards calling for ' "Freedom for
Iran" were attacked by a group of about a hundred pro-Shah demonstrators.
Once over the police barriers, the attackers advanced on the crowd, armed with
iron bars. The demonstrators called on the police to stop the attack. The police
charged the anti-Shah demonstrators. Skirmishes continued throughout the day:
"12.40 smoking bombs in front of the city hall . . . 15.50 egg-and-paint bombs
thrown in front of the castle. . . 17.00 a demonstrator throws an egg . . . 79.47
firecrackers were thrown at the cortege of the Shah" - so the chronicle of the
Berlin daily Morgenpost. But the most violent confrontations took place in the
evening in front of the opera house, where the Berlin authorities and their guests
were to attend a concert, protected by about one thousand policemen. Before
the beginning of the performance, members of the Shah's escort had thrown
stones at the students, who had retaliated with rotten eggs, bags of flour, and
tomatoes - the typical ' 'arms'' of the student movement. A few minutes after
the performance began, the police charged the demonstrators with truncheons.
Employing what the chief of the police described as the "sausage" tactic, some
police units pushed the demonstrators at the front of the ' 'sausage,'' while
others charged them from behind. During the ensuing fights between the police
and demonstrators, a plainclothes policeman shot and killed the student Benno
Ohnesorg. Besides this death, the final toll of the fights amounted to twenty-
xiv Preface
eight injured among the policemen, at least twenty-two injured (some of them
seriously) among the demonstrators, and a total of forty-seven arrests.
June 2, 1967, represented a climax. Professors, assistants, and researchers
from many universities issued statements stigmatizing the ' 'brutal repression of
fundamental democratic rights,'' labeling police brutality a legacy of the Nazi
past and proof of the weakness of democracy. But if the protestors and their
allies advocated "Widerstandsrecht" - the right to resist unjust authorities -
the political parties and part of the press accused the students of demonstrating
* *against democracy.'' The demonstrators were, in fact, stigmatized as ' 'Radi-
kalinskis financed by the East," as an anarchist minority, as professional rev-
olutionaries (Berufsrevoluzzer), or simply as bloodthirsty, hysterical rioters. The
red flags of the students were considered symbols of the subordination of the
protestors to the German Democratic Republic: ' 'Red flags.'' wrote the con-
servative and sensationalistic Bild, ' 'the symbols under which the popular re-
bellion of June 17 [1953] was repressed and the wall was built. Communist
slogans in front of the city hall, after that, just yesterday, another human being
was killed at the border.'' As puppets of the communist regimes, the demon-
strators were then accused ofproducing chaos in West Berlin in order to provide
the Soviet Union with an excuse for military intervention. The street violence
evoked, in fact, the phantom of the Weimar Republic and the breakdown of
democracy: "All of us, who lived in the period before 1933," proclaimed a
social-democratic member of the Berlin Parliament, "we know how it starts and
how it ends.'' At least part of public opinion seemed to share the prevailing
comment of the authoritative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine, which stated that
"political demonstrations are the most stupid and useless means of political
participation.''

Rome, March 1, 1968. At 10 a.m. several thousand students converged on Piazza

di Spagna to protest against the police intervention to clear the occupation of
the Roman university buildings by students. The Roman occupation and its coun-
terparts all over Italy were part of a massive mobilization campaign for a reform
of the university system. The march, joined by high school students, passed the
headquarters of the RAI (the Italian public television broadcasting network) and
the Christian Democratic daily, II Popolo, and then reached Valle Giulia, where
helmeted policemen armed with truncheons had garrisoned the faculty of ar-
chitecture. The two sides confronted each other for a few minutes; then the
fights, later known, in the movement's mythology, as "The Battle of Valle Giu-
lia," started. The clashes lasted for over three hours, in a dramatic escalation
of violence. The police attacked with tear gas and water cannons; the students
retaliated with eggs and stones. The police received reinforcements, and so did
the students, while an enormous traffic jam blocked the entire city center. Ac-
cording to the police, the students built barricades with cars and destroyed
police Jeeps. According to the demonstrators, the police acted with great bru-
 Preface xv
tality, charging to the command: "Kill them." The struggle, in which about
3,000 demonstrators and 2,000 policemen were involved, resulted in 211 injured
(158 of them among the police), 228 arrested, and 4 imprisoned.
The Battle of Valle Giulia triggered an embittered debate,which polarized the
political system. The students found a strong ally in the Old Left, which called
for the formation of a large reformist and progressive front. On the next day,
the Roman leftist daily Paese Sera, openly referring to the resistance movement
against the Nazi occupation, ran the headline: "Unarmed they faced chains,
clubs, Jeeps, and guns. The young courage of the students humiliates the bru-
tality of the police.'' For the students and their allies, the enemy was the an-
tidemocratic forces that responded to the demands for reform with ' fascist
repression." As a leader of the Socialist Party (then in government) put it, the
' 'barbarian methods of the police'' were paralleled only by the German round-
ing-up of members of the resistance in occupied Italy. Although the students
found allies in the political system, for the conservative political spectrum and
a large part of the press they were nothing else than left-wing extremists, ag-
itprops, and political troublemakers. Instigated by the communists, they were
said to produce chaos in order to destroy democracy: "The disorders at the
university," stated the Roman daily II Tempo, "are provoked for political rea-
sons by those Moscovite or Chinese communists who found the way to unhinge,
even for the future, the scientific institution, hitting the nation in one of its more
essential parts." Praising the police, Minister of Home Affairs Taviani recalled
that ' 'the weakness and uncertainty of the forces of law and order were among
the components of the decline of democracy and the advent of fascism.''

The two episodes summarized here had a high symbolic impact on social move-
ments and the political systems in the Federal Republic of Germany and Italy.
On the one hand, they triggered a violent escalation in the interactions between
protestors and the police, destined to continue well into the seventies. On the
other hand, they polarized the political arena between those who conceived
protest as an essential part of the democratic process and those who saw it as
a danger. If in the early nineties, most observers consider social movements to
be peaceful actors in the democratic system, in the sixties and the seventies,
protest appeared to many as synonymous with disorder and violence.
Has the reality of protest changed so much over the past three decades? Or
do we observe - and judge - social movements from a totally different per-
spective? Certainly a shift in both positions has occurred. Now, activists who
challenge the establishment have access to the polity through channels that were
simply unavailable to their counterparts thirty years ago. Moreover, challengers
are better organized and can draw on a repertoire of collective action that has
broadened considerably over the past thirty years. Generally, then, the social
movements that emerged during these years achieved some substantial success.
After each wave of protest, new collective actors were accepted into the arena
xvi Preface
of "normal" politics. Indeed, the cycle of protest that began in most Western
democracies - and elsewhere - in the mid-sixties produced profound changes
in the institutional system, contributing in particular to a more liberal conception
of democracy and citizens' rights.
But social movements themselves have changed over the past decades, es-
pecially in their attitudes toward the use of violence as a means of exerting
political pressure. In the sixties, although attitudes differed somewhat from one
country to another, movement activists were generally ambivalent as to the use
of violence. In the seventies, however, a variety of circumstances transformed
this ambivalence, at least for a good portion of movement activists, into a pos-
itive attitude. In several countries, the forms of protest then radicalized, state
repression increased, and the escalation on both sides often lasted for several
years, before the vicious circle of violence-repression-violence-repression was
interrupted. When political and social conflicts became radicalized, terrorist or-
ganizations emerged in several representative democracies, including the United
States, Japan, and various European countries. For a while, in the seventies and
early eighties, the political elites perceived political violence as a serious threat
to the stability of several Western European countries.
This dramatic evolution raises several questions. Why did political conflicts
radicalize precisely in those societies that seemed to have been pacified by the
development of the welfare state and the institutionalization of the labor conflict?
Why did movement organizations, which originally emphasized spontaneity and
grass-roots democracy, transform themselves into small, often "armed," sects?
Why did a generation socialized to politics in a democracy and in the calm and
affluence of the early sixties resort to violence? The social sciences were slow
to provide answers to these questions. On the one hand, reliable sources were
scarce; on the other hand, the tense political climate of the years in which
violence peaked was not conducive to objective scientific research. The socio-
logical contribution therefore consisted of rather abstract, deductive theories on
the nature of conflict and violence. More recently, various case studies on radical
political organizations have improved our knowledge of the phenomenon. But
we still lack an empirically based explanation of the escalation and de-escalation
of political conflict. Only a historical and cross-national comparison of the char-
acteristics and dynamics of political violence will, I believe, allow us to combine
the detailed information provided by the case studies with a broad explanation
that is the aim of sociological theory. Through my research on the roots and
manifestations of political violence in Italy and the Federal Republic of Germany
from the end of the sixties to the end of the eighties I attempt to analyze radi-
calization processes in a comparative perspective, with the hope of bridging this
gulf between abstract theories and case studies.

Several people and institutions helped me in this enterprise. First of all, the
Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation generously supported my comparative re-
 Preface xvii
search with a three-year Career Development Award. For my work on the
German case, the research unit on Social Movements and the Public Sphere at
the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung provided me with a most
stimulating environment for three years. For the Italian case, I used in part the
materials I had collected during a research project at the Istituto di Studi e
Ricerche Carlo Cattaneo, in Bologna; the research for my doctoral dissertation
at the European University Institute in Florence; and a Visiting Fellowship at
the Western Societies Program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. More-
over, I continued my research as a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Political
Science in Florence. The actual writing of this book began when I was a Visiting
Scholar at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
Finding original sources for empirical research on political violence is not an
easy matter. I am most grateful to all those who trusted me enough to help me
in my search for information in both countries. I am particularly obliged to the
Italian judges Gian Carlo Caselli, Rosario Minna, Armando Spataro, and Pier-
luigi Vigna; the Istituto di Studi e Ricerche Carlo Cattaneo in Bologna; Peter
Katzenstein at Cornell; and the President of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin,
Friedhelm Neidhardt. Moreover, I am grateful to all those activists who agreed
to narrate their often painful experiences with political violence.
The list of sociologists, political scientists, and historians with whom I had
the good fortune to discuss parts of my research is simply too long to cite. I
presented partial results of my research at the International Meeting on Com-
parative Social Movements at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin in December
1989; the Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research in
Bochum in April 1990; the World Congress of the International Sociological
Association in Madrid in July 1990; the International Conference on Social
Movement Theory in Berlin in June 1990; the International Conference "Eur-
opean-American Perspective of Social Movements" in Washington in August
1991; the Tagung of the Neue Soziale Bewegungen Forschungsjournal in Bonn
in 1991 and 1992; the "First European Conference on Social Movements" in
October 1992 in Berlin; and the World Congress of the International Sociolog-
ical Association in 1994 in Bielefeld. During these workshops I was able to
discuss various pieces of my work with colleagues and friends: Robert Benford,
Karl-Werner Brandt, Mario Diani, Bill Gamson, Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter
Kriesi, Juan Linz, Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, Alberto Melucci, Dieter
Rucht, David Snow, Sidney Tarrow, Leonard Weinberg, and Mayer Zald are
among them. From all of them, I have learned much more than I could ac-
knowledge in my footnotes. Colleagues at my research unit at the Wissenschafts-
zentrum - Barbara Blattert, Dieter Rucht, Friedhelm Neidhardt, Birgit Peters,
Dieter Fuchs, Thomas Ohlemacher, and Jiirgen Gerhard - all assisted me, with
kindness and patience, in the various steps of learning German and getting ac-
customed to the German political system. Friedhelm Neidhardt and Dieter Rucht
- as well as Martha Crenshaw, Mario Diani, Bert Klandermans, and Nicola
xviii Preface
Lacey - read drafts of the chapters and offered much welcome comment. An
article I wrote with Dieter Rucht constitutes the basis for the second chapter of
this volume. I am most grateful to Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow, who had
the courage and courtesy to read the whole - unedited - manuscript. Although
the responsibility for what I have written is, of course, mine, this book benefited
greatly from their comments.
Martha Linke edited, with competence and care, the entire manuscript, strug-
gling to make my English readable. Clare Tame skillfully reedited several chap-
ters that I had drastically revised after the first copyediting.
Finally, my gratitude goes to Herbert Reiter. I cannot be sure that this book
would have not been written without him, but I am sure that my understanding
of Germany would have been much more superficial and my life in Germany
less exciting without his presence. Even if we do not always agree on our
judgments of our native countries - which is normal between historian and a
political scientist - I hope he will learn as much about Italy from me as I have
learned from him about Germany.

D.d.P.
Florence
April 1995
 1
Comparative research on political violence

In Western democracy, the social movements of the eighties and early nineties
have generally been very pragmatic in their aims, moderate in their tactics, and
well connected to political authorities and policy makers - so much so that
several scholars have asked whether they can still be called social movements.
There are indeed many impressive differences from their counterparts of the late
sixties and the seventies. Social movements have often been defined by their
use of unconventional strategies and loose organizational structures, but both
characteristics have changed a great deal since the sixties - especially in the use
of political violence. As mentioned in the Foreword, the movements of the
sixties and the seventies often "encountered" violence: they used violent tactics,
and they faced violent repression. If in the mid-sixties political activists advo-
cated nonviolent protest, by the end of the decade, in most Western democracies,
several emphasized the need for "self-defense." In the seventies, violence be-
came more and more organized in some countries. Radical, sometimes under-
ground, organizations emerged and engaged with the state in a military struggle
that they eventually lost. Their negative example probably contributed to the
tactical moderation of protest in the eighties.
From our historical point of observation, the nineties constitute the end of a
cycle of protest that began in the sixties: new actors emerged, encountered se-
vere reactions, fought back, and finally found their way into "normal" politics.
Several questions, however, remain about the dynamics of the emergence and
institutionalization of new collective actors, and the escalation and de-escalation
of their action repertoires. What brought about a new explosion of political
violence after the conservative tranquillity of the fifties and the reformist hopes
of the early sixties? How can we explain why a generation socialized to dem-
ocratic values resorted to political violence? Why, in the "First World," were
the police ordered to open fire on political demonstrators? This volume is an
attempt to answer these questions by drawing on research on social movements,
political violence, and the state in Italy and the Federal Republic of Germany
from the late sixties to the nineties.
 Comparative research on political violence
This introductory chapter describes the theoretical approach, explains the
choice for the cross-national comparison, identifies the methods and sources
used, and summarizes the scheme of the volume.

SOCIAL SCIENCE AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Political violence does not belong to the established, mainstream areas of re-
search in either sociology or political science. Whereas scholars who work on
parties or interest groups, the government, or public administration can rely upon
relatively well defined concepts and choose between already formulated theories,
the social scientist wishing to focus on political violence needs to develop, first
of all, a definition of political violence per se and, then, to construct a set of
categories and research hypotheses borrowing from different fields of research.

In search of a definition
In order to be useful for scientific purposes, a concept has to meet certain re-
quirements: it must be neutral and univocal, communicable and discriminating.
As a concept "imported" in the scientific jargon from everyday life, political
violence - as generally understood - lacks these requisites: it is ideologically
loaded and its meaning varies according to social and political groups, geograph-
ical area, and historical period. In its everyday use "violence" refers to "acting
with or characterized by great physical force, so as to injure, damage, or destroy;
[or] .. . force unlawfully or callously used" (Webster's New World Dictionary
of the American Language, 2nd college edition, 1979). Violence is therefore the
use of great physical force to inflict damage. In the same way, the standard
social science definition of violence refers to "behavior designed to inflict phys-
ical injury on people or damage to property" (Graham and Gurr 1969:xxvii),
or "any observable interaction in the course of which persons or objects are
seized or physically damaged in spite of resistance" (Tilly 1978:176). Political
violence then is the use of physical force in order to damage a political adver-
sary. If we leave aside state or state-sponsored violence, political violence com-
prises "collective attacks within a political community against a political
regime" (Gurr 1970:3-4).' In these situations, violence may emerge intention-
ally or accidentally: " [as the] deliberate infliction or threat of infliction of
physical injury or damage for political ends," or as violence "which occurs
unintentionally in the course of severe political conflict" (Wilkinson 1986:30).
In general, political violence consists of those repertoires of collective action
that involve great physical force and cause damage to an adversary in order to
impose political aims (della Porta and Tarrow 1986:614).
This definition is, however, not easy to operationalize since the understanding
of both "great" and "damage" is highly subjective. A certain degree of phys-
ical force is involved in forms of collective action that are usually not considered
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