-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Frank Biess, Andrew S. Tompkins. Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1750–1751, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy227
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Better Active than Radioactive! is an engaging and innovative study of the French and West German antinuclear movements of the 1970s. Andrew S. Tompkins argues that “the opposition to nuclear power . . . cannot be fully understood without taking into account transnational factors and the complexities they introduce” (237). While the success of West German antinuclear protest has often been contrasted with the failure of its French counterpart, such national peculiarities, Tompkins argues, “mask a great deal” and obscure a shared transnational history that, according to him, was critical to the emergence of the antinuclear movement (7). The author seeks to tell the history of antinuclear protest “from the bottom up,” and in so doing, he emphasizes how activists on both sides of the Rhine constantly crossed the border and envisioned antinuclear protest as a transnational enterprise (2). They learned from each other, used each other’s presence as a way to legitimize their protest, and envisioned subnational regional as well as supranational European identities, yet occasionally they also struggled, as Tompkins demonstrates well, with linguistic or cultural barriers. These transnational links were especially strong in the Upper Rhine Valley, where potential nuclear power plants were concentrated on both sides of the border, in Alsace and in Baden-Württemberg.
