Social Protest and Policy Change: Ecology, Antinuclear, and Peace Movements in Comparative Perspective

Extract

Social Protest and Policy Change: Ecology, Antinuclear, and Peace Movements in Comparative Perspective. By Marco Giugni. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 320p. $75.00 cloth, $32.95 paper.

The same things that provoke social movements also promote institutional pressures for change, shifts in public opinion, and policy change. As a result, disentangling the effects of protest on policy presents an ongoing analytical challenge. If we look, for example, at the volatile and diverse movement against the American war in Vietnam, it is virtually impossible to track clear lines of influence between the volume or disruptiveness of protests covered in the news and spending on the war or casualties produced in battle. At the same time, by reviewing memoirs, archives, and the broader outlines of policy, we know that the movement had longer-term effects, including (minimally), ending military conscription and establishing much stricter political and military tests for long-term commitments of American combat forces overseas. The latter set of constraints, codified as the Weinberger, then the Powell, doctrines, held sway over American military policy from the end of Vietnam until, finally, violated by the current American intervention in Iraq. At the same time, politicians of both parties vigorously try to reassure nervous youth, many of whom are children of the protest generation, that the draft is indeed gone for good. Clearly, the protests against the Vietnam war mattered, though perhaps not exactly in the ways that activists hoped or as much as they dreamed.