Antinuclear politics in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s have attracted considerable historiographical attention of late. Stephen Milder's book follows closely upon Andrew Tompkins's Better Active Than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany (Oxford, 2016), and is followed, in turn, by Dolores Augustine's Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present (Berghahn, 2018). To varying degrees and in different ways, these three studies partake of a transnational and comparative turn. Whereas Augustine compares antinuclear politics in East and West Germany, and Tompkins compares movements in the Federal Republic of Germany and France, Milder focuses closely on West Germany while situating developments there within a broader West European context. A particular strength of Greening Democracy is Milder's close attention to the local and regional settings of antinuclear activism, coupled with a keen analysis of how these settings were affected by the border-crossing influences of the Federal Republic's close neighbors.

The book opens with an examination of opposition to the building of nuclear power plants in the upper Rhine region in the mid-1970s. There, transnational influences were obvious and significant by dint of West Germany's shared border with France. The nuclear industry's attempts to capitalize on the shared river way as a source of cooling water for planned power plants produced strong opposition marked by shared concerns, parallel protest movements, mutual influence, and concrete activist connections. The Rhineland case study grounds a key claim of Milder's book: that the democratic content of environmental politics in West Germany was less a product of the rise of the Green Party (Die Grünen) and its entry into parliament in the early 1980s than of the mid-1970s period of activism in which citizens elaborated their own democratic praxis at the grassroots level.

The protagonists of the campaigns Milder examines were diverse, differing both socially and politically from the student and countercultural militants who drove the mobilizations of the previous decade. This shift is well known to historians, but Milder's account demonstrates the multifaceted character of the movement(s) in granular detail. Tracing shifting alliances that could and did at different times encompass anarchist-oriented Spontis (activist groups) and members of Marxist-Leninist cadre parties (K-Gruppen), farmers, vintners, and housewives, Milder lends concreteness and specificity to the Green claim to be “neither left nor right, but out in front.” In the protests against nuclear power plants in Wyhl (1975), and Brokdorf (1976–1977), these diverse actors taught themselves democracy. Milder argues that, far from weakening the parliamentary-democratic order, protests arising from the realm of anti-parliamentary politics strengthened it. In this way, activists “greened democracy” at multiple levels.

Milder situates extra-parliamentary antinuclear politics vis-à-vis the longstanding debate in German history about Germany's relationship to democracy in the postwar period. This debate was sharpened further in the 1970s by the specter of a left-wing terror campaign that the government combatted in ways that tested and sometimes overstepped liberal democratic norms. The situating of this ideologically heterodox, globally oriented movement into a longstanding debate about whether and how Germany could become democratic begs several questions, not least what the term democracy even means. To demonstrate, as Milder does, that citizens’ engagement outside of normal channels ultimately helped to solidify the parliamentary-democratic order could be to insert grassroots democratic movements into a narrative of progress to which they did not necessarily aspire.

The question is partly one of scale. Like transnational history in general, and like the history of environmental social movements in particular, Greening Democracy deals in intersections between the global and the local. The latter receives pride of place in Milder's study, as it must, given the level of detail provided. The book shows how activists looked abroad for solutions, but we learn little about the transatlantic connections that shaped grassroots environmental politics let alone the broader extra-German scientific and philosophical influences that acted upon them. Another tension of scale exists in this book, one between a “local” defined as Germany and its historical issues and debates, and a “global” understood as the emancipatory content of a pro-environmental and antinuclear movement, which, in its most capacious iteration, refused artificial divisions, not only between countries, but between politics narrowly defined and other spheres of human endeavor. Placing such activity into the analytic straightjacket of governance conceals as much as it reveals about both its historical significance and its contemporary relevance.

Yet, if Greening Democracy is bound up with a question that is local in both senses just outlined—the question of the terms and conditions of German democracy—Milder is nevertheless alert to the broader implications of this question. As he points out, the institutionalization of environmentalism in the form of Die Grünen resulted in a move away from pan-European optimism and globalizing emancipatory commitments. But these potentials remain a key part of the legacy of the grassroots democratic mobilizations Milder examines. Much remains to be written about the relationship between environmentalism and democracy, war, peace, and social justice. For now, in showing how West German activists democratized themselves while helping to democratize their society, Milder has given us a richly researched book that will be an indispensible resource for future scholars.