Thousands of demonstrators crowded Trafalgar Square on a chilly April afternoon in 1978 to protest the planned expansion of nuclear fuel reprocessing operations at the Windscale Reactor in rural Cumbria. Toward the end of the rally, a young woman faced the mass of protestors from behind the podium. “I am here to bring you greetings of solidarity from the various European, Australian, and Japanese anti-nuclear movements,” she announced. She explained that the movements whose greetings she brought to London represented “a great wave of transnational determination to put a stop to Windscale, to put a stop to a nuclearized, militarized Europe.” Within the next few moments, she described the contours of this “transnational wave.” She took her audience from Aboriginal territory in Australia, where Green Ban strikes interfered with uranium mining, to the nonviolent demonstrations against reactor construction in German villages, and back to Windscale, where protesters demanded a stop to nuclear fuel reprocessing. In the few minutes she stood at the podium, Petra Kelly narrated an around-the-world journey that had taken her most of the previous two decades to complete.Footnote ¹

Kelly's trip around the world, including her 1978 visit to London, could perhaps be viewed as little more than the personal journey of a single dedicated activist. But her travels between local sites of resistance, which took her from remote German villages to the Australian Outback to Hiroshima, made her “an important part of the international networking of the anti-uranium, anti-atom, and anti-atomic-power initiatives.”Footnote ² Networking transformed grassroots anti-reactor campaigns, which had been devoted to “point-based programs” and intended to solve local problems outside the context of national politics, into a consolidated “movement” against nuclear power. In transcending the local context, sociologist Dieter Rucht has argued that networking “expanded the horizon of problems” relevant to grassroots anti-nuclear activists and caused them to begin developing “constructive alternatives alongside their preventative actions.”Footnote ³ As she traveled the globe networking grassroots activists and publicizing their “constructive alternatives” to a society powered by nuclear energy, Kelly played a key role in the eventual migration of anti-nuclear activism from rural regions such as Cumbria and the Rhine valley to capital cities such as London and Bonn.

Despite the significance of Kelly's role during the 1970s and the prominence she enjoyed throughout the Federal Republic as the country's best-known Green politician in the early 1980s, however, scholars have discounted Kelly's importance to the development of Die Grünen. As political scientist Ruth Bevan has recently noted, to the extent that Kelly's name “finds mention in current academic literature on the Greens, it is usually only in passing.”Footnote ⁴ One reason for this neglect of Kelly and her legacy is evident even in Bevan's article, “Petra Kelly: The Other Green,” one of only a handful of scholarly works that take Kelly's contributions to Green politics seriously. Bevan asserts that Kelly “enjoyed a relatively brief but spectacular political career,” a career that “began in 1979 when she helped to found the German Greens ‘anti-party party’ and soared after she … won election to the Bundestag in 1983.”Footnote ⁵ This description of Kelly's career fits the commonly accepted chronology of German Green politics, a chronology that overlooks the movement-building of the 1970s and treats the few electoral campaigns that preceded the party's triumphant entrance into the Bundestag in 1983 as the extent of the West German Greens' prehistory.Footnote ⁶

Within this truncated timeline, Kelly's falling out with Die Grünen, which began almost as soon as the party entered the Bundestag, is the primary evidence of her limited relevance to the longer trajectory of Green politics. Sociologists Dieter Rucht and Jochen Roose, for example, condescendingly describe Kelly as a “sort of ecological Joan of Arc” who played “no strategically important function” within Die Grünen.Footnote ⁷ In focusing on Kelly's difficulty in cooperating with her Green colleagues during the 1980s, however, scholars have failed to explain how an outsider such as Kelly became the public face of the first new political party to enter the Bundestag since the early days of the Federal Republic. Answering this question requires a longer view of Green politics in Germany, one that goes back beyond the initial Green electoral campaigns.

Most scholars interested in a longer view of the Greens would agree with Andrei Markovits and Philip Gorski that, “one can identify clear predecessors of the Green Party within the context of the West German Left.” The Greens' predecessors, Markovits and Gorski argue, emerged from the SPD during the 1950s, diverged from one another during the 1960s and 1970s, and then reconverged “into the Greens” in the 1980s.Footnote ⁸ Using the biography of Joschka Fischer as an example, Paul Hockenos affirms this narrative of reconvergence. Fischer initially rejected the Green movement because he believed that it did not have any roots in “the socialist tradition.” He felt that joining the Greens would be no different from jumping “a train in the opposite direction just because it has more steam.”Footnote ⁹ Despite his misgivings, however, Fischer did eventually depart from the Frankfurt Sponti scene and adopt the Green party as his new political home, a move that supports the argument that the Greens became a point of reconvergence for the German Left's many factions during the 1980s.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet Fischer's early reluctance to join the party highlights the fact that he did not immediately consider the Green project to be in line with his own political work, which he located within the socialist Left.

Fischer was far from alone in questioning the Greens' place on the political Left. In light of many West European Greens' reluctance to count themselves as leftists, historian Belinda Davis has questioned the meaning of this term and the usefulness of a Left-Right matrix for analyses of politics in postwar Europe.Footnote ¹¹ Instead, Davis has argued for a broader definition of “popular politics” in postwar Europe.Footnote ¹² Petra Kelly, who made a point of rejecting both the 68er movement and the left-wing splinter groups that succeeded it, seems to exemplify Davis's challenge to the traditional Left-Right political spectrum and to validate Davis's emphasis on histories that see “beyond national boundaries but also across more conventional cultural barriers.”Footnote ¹³ By involving herself in the movement toward European integration, Kelly consciously placed herself outside the traditional fold of the West German Left. The internationalist viewpoint that she developed from Brussels not only allowed Kelly to see beyond boundaries and across barriers, but it also brought her into contact with what Davis refers to as “activists of less predictable types.” Because of the significance of Kelly and her ideas to the early development of Die Grünen, a significance that is evident in her place at the top of the ticket in all of the party's early electoral campaigns, understanding Kelly's adoption and embellishment of the grassroots democratic model pioneered by local anti-nuclear activists is key to understanding the rise of the Greens. Thus, retracing Kelly's personal journey through the 1970s helps to explain the roles played by transnational thinking and activists from outside the political “Left” in the successful establishment of an alternative political party in the Federal Republic.

Straddling the Atlantic: Rethinking West German Politics in the U.S. South

Petra Kelly's ability to imagine fresh ideas into the central European political landscape was essential for the innovative activism she practiced during the 1970s. The scope of her imagination was broadened by her transnational perspective on West German politics. In a sense, Kelly benefited from the same “trick of vision” that historian Daniel Rodgers has argued progressive reformers employed early in the twentieth century. According to Rodgers, it was this unique way of viewing the world that “allowed American city planners to see Paris's étoiles and triumphal arches in their own city streets, or municipal ownership partisans to imagine Glasgow streetcars buzzing down Chicago's elevated tracks.”Footnote ¹⁴ Rodgers argues that these imagined improvements expanded the realm of possibilities for urban planners and made the great reforms of the early twentieth century possible. Similar to those who had crossed the Atlantic earlier in the century, Petra Kelly and her activist allies would use their own “trick of vision” to imagine foreign elements in the dysfunctional political landscapes around them and incorporate new ideas into social movements.

Petra Kelly's transnational political vision was closely linked to the around-the-world journey she began in her childhood.Footnote ¹⁵ She was born to German parents in the provincial town of Günzburg, Bavaria, in 1947, but after her father walked out on the family, her mother, Marianne Birle Lehmann, remarried an American GI. In 1960 Petra Kelly's new stepfather, John Edward Kelly, was transferred from Laupheim, Germany, to Fort Benning, Georgia.Footnote ¹⁶ He took his family across the Atlantic with him, and twelve-year-old Petra entered Baker High School in nearby Columbus. Despite her continued devotion to Germany, Kelly would not again reside in her native country until 1983, when she was elected to the Bundestag at the top of the Green party ticket. Reflecting on West German politics from the U.S. South offered Kelly a unique perspective from which she questioned patterns of student activism in both countries and imagined new forms of action that blended together elements from these two distinct national contexts.

Kelly was an extremely active and engaged high-school student. As a senior in 1966, she wrote a poem entitled “In Defense of My Generation” that “won her the coveted title of class poet.”Footnote ¹⁷ Yet rather than defending her generation against the authority of the older generation along the lines of the generational conflict that scholars have identified as a key element of the student movement, Kelly's poem placed her generation alongside the older generation in a common struggle for peace and social justice.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, Kelly's “defense” of the senior class hinged on her proud vision of a politically engaged, yet responsible younger generation that had already begun to “fight maturely beside the mature on the front lines.”Footnote ¹⁹ As the title to her poem implies, Kelly was quite aware of the generational conflict taking place in the late 1960s; as her call to mature action makes clear, however, she hoped to resolve it through cooperation, not rebellion.

Kelly's political involvement did not grow until she enrolled at American University in Washington, D.C., in fall 1966. Her move from a southern military town to a college campus in the American capital placed her in the midst of the student movement, but she was unimpressed by what she saw. In a 1972 poem entitled “To A.U.'s Revolutionaries …,” Kelly reflected on her time in Washington and went so far as to criticize her fellow AU students for being too rebellious. Kelly duly noted students' support for unfairly paid cafeteria workers and acknowledged the emergency rooms they set up in the student union. “But,” she asked:

In criticizing her fellow students for their unwillingness to take their studies seriously and for their general lack of discipline, Kelly seems almost to have placed herself in the camp of the older generation of leftists, who decried 1960s student activists as “a new brand of anarchists, very different from the endearing characters who many of us knew … They are wreckers who … are concerned only to disrupt society.”Footnote ²¹ Regardless of whether she hoped to associate herself with the “old Left,” Kelly's call for a mature, yet politically active younger generation, separated her from the sort of countercultural, anti-authoritarian “student revolutionaries” who exemplified the 68er movement.

Despite this disconnect from the supposed values of 1968, however, Kelly was a dedicated and accomplished student organizer at AU. She came into personal contact with Senator Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) before his presidential run, and was co-coordinator of “the Students for Kennedy group” in Washington, D.C., by early 1968.Footnote ²² After RFK was assassinated, a devastated Kelly wrote to Senator Hubert Humphrey, another personal acquaintance, seeking advice.Footnote ²³ Unsurprisingly, Humphrey “told her Kennedy's death was not the end, and invited her to join his campaign.”Footnote ²⁴ Kelly followed up on Humphrey's suggestion with gusto, soon becoming the Humphrey campaign's top student coordinator at AU. Throughout fall 1968, Kelly organized AU students' participation in the campaign and even received personal phone calls from the candidate in her dorm room.Footnote ²⁵ By election night, Kelly had become prominent enough as a student organizer that she was flown to Minneapolis for the campaign's final rally.Footnote ²⁶

Given her hard work for Humphrey and her deep political engagement on campus, Kelly contrasted herself sharply with the Frisbee-playing, acid-tripping AU “student revolutionaries.” She concluded her poem to AU's rebels with insights she had gained since returning to Europe in 1970. Now “away from you [AU revolutionaries], your platforms, and your playgrounds,” Kelly explained to her erstwhile classmates, she would stay and “seek roots” in Europe, where she had learned that:

For Petra Kelly then, the contrast between herself and her AU colleagues was a distinction between serious, focused work toward realistic political solutions and a fleeting engagement with social issues overshadowed by a lack of dedication.Footnote ²⁷ Kelly had been critical of immature “student revolutionaries” throughout the 1960s, but even the more studied, or as she put it “scientific,” form of activism she had experienced in Europe did not quite match her political outlook.

In an analysis of the German Left written in her last semester at AU, Kelly remarked that “The German revolt is almost intent on calling itself ‘scientific’ or using words [such] as ‘dialectical’ or ‘rational,’ whereas in American SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] chapters there is little talk of theory.” The German students' “scientific” approach seems in line with Kelly's emphasis on dedication to study and political maturity. Yet Kelly still faulted German students for their complete lack of “love, community, or human warmth,” traits she readily associated with the “U.S. rebel.” It was only by incorporating the U.S. rebel's humanity that Kelly believed that German students could carry the movement “further to other segments of society.” Unlike their unserious and idealistic American counterparts, German students were actually too intellectually driven and isolated from the rest of society for their own good.Footnote ²⁸

Straddling the Atlantic, with one foot in North America and the other in Europe, Petra Kelly had a unique point of reference from which to investigate, critique, and compare the American and German student movements. Despite her identification with American student activists' warmth and their “screams” to “change the world” on the one hand and her respect for German students' critical engagement with theoretical texts on the other, she simply could not bring herself to accept either group's methods. Yet a transnational “trick of vision” enabled her to combine the urgency and compassion she attributed to the U.S. rebel with the intellectualism and maturity she saw in German activists. Throughout her political career, Kelly's willingness to think outside national boundaries and her ability to imagine foreign ideas in the local landscape would define her politics. Thus, although the remnants of the “quickly disintegrating” German student movement were already hardening into distinct factions at the time of her return to Europe in fall 1970, Kelly remained aloof from these leftist splinter groups.Footnote ²⁹ She was able to remain active even as she avoided these established factions by turning toward a nascent polity that was as yet of little interest to the radical Left.

Searching for Citizens in a Lonely Capital

Petra Kelly's turn toward the European Economic Commission (EEC) in Brussels after her graduation from AU was an unusual choice for a motivated young activist in 1970. Historian John Gillingham has described the EEC in the 1970s as an organization “ground between the hither and nether millstones, stuck between a rock and a hard place, flattened between exogenous pressure from above and endogenous force from below.”Footnote ³⁰ Yet where Gillingham saw nothing more than an unappetizing sandwich of “a thin slice of processed ham, a single soggy piece of lettuce, browning and curled at the edges, and a solitary smear of butter,” Kelly saw the opportunity to “create a large, socially progressive zone in the world.” In struggling to create a “United Europe” with “meaning for the NON-managers and NON-bankers,” Kelly believed she was working to “rearrange the social order for the benefit of the underprivileged.”Footnote ³¹ Furthermore, by taking a European approach to the problems of non-managers and non-bankers across the continent, she set herself apart from the factions of the splintered West German Left. Still, Kelly's devotion to the European cause and her proactive nature did not immediately bring her into contact with Europe's underprivileged citizens. Instead, her hard work led her deep into the Brussels “Eurocracy” and helped her forge connections with a small, but dedicated group of young integrationists in Germany.

Kelly approached European politics intentionally and methodically. Even before her return to the continent, she had directed her thoughts toward an internationally integrated “United Europe.” As she neared the end of her undergraduate education at AU, Kelly applied to post-graduate programs in European Integration at several European universities. In spring 1970, she accepted a scholarship to a master's program in European Integration at the University of Amsterdam from among a handful of other offers.Footnote ³² One year later, with her new degree in hand, Kelly left Amsterdam for Brussels, the ostensible command center of European integration. Here she planned to augment her academic knowledge of European politics with practical experience by combining dissertation research on organizations working toward European unity with an internship at the EEC.Footnote ³³

When Kelly began her internship in late 1971, she found Brussels full of opportunities. French President Charles de Gaulle's recent resignation had removed one roadblock to EEC expansion, and now Great Britain, Denmark, and Ireland were all on the verge of joining the original six EEC member states. In the midst of this excitement, Kelly began drafting calls for the democratization of the EEC and pushed for reforms that she believed would increase Europe's legitimacy in the eyes of the continent's underprivileged. In this context, she came to see “the direct election” to the European Parliament as a necessity for a United Europe with “political democratic legitimacy.”Footnote ³⁴

Kelly's repeated calls for direct elections to the European Parliament were echoed by the Young European Federalists (JEF), a Europe-wide activist group dedicated to the creation of a federal government structure for a United Europe. Kelly first came into contact with the JEF through the German chapter's magazine, Forum E (short for Forum Europa), to which she started submitting articles shortly after her arrival in Brussels. The relationship that began with this trickle of correspondence soon grew to the point that members of Forum E's Bonn-based editorial staff stopped to visit Kelly on their trips to Brussels.Footnote ³⁵ For Kelly, collaboration with the Forum E team was a way into a community of West German activists who shared her desire for a socially progressive, united Europe. For the staff of Forum E, on the other hand, working with Kelly offered access to the inside of the EEC's Brussels headquarters, particularly to the office of Dutch EEC Commissioner Sicco Mansholt, the Commission's President from March 1972 until January 1973, and Kelly's lover from summer 1973 until early 1975.Footnote ³⁶

Kelly first met Mansholt in summer 1972 after her dissertation research stipend was revoked by her sponsor, the Christian Democrat Press and Information Office. Kelly's attempts to publicize her findings that European integration under the EEC's leadership was benefiting only bankers and managers, and not the underprivileged, outraged the Christian Democrats as well as her supervisors at the EEC.Footnote ³⁷ Unsure where to turn, the twenty-four-year-old intern took matters into her own hands. “Spontaneously, without making an appointment she rode up to the thirteenth floor and marched determinedly into the [EEC] president's office.” The man she found there was Sicco Mansholt. Kelly greeted President Mansholt by launching into an outraged diatribe about the state of the EEC. Far from being bowled over by Kelly's verbal onslaught, however, the sixty-three-year-old Dutchman “made many seriously-minded compliments and even arranged for [Kelly] to continue her study.”Footnote ³⁸ By fall 1972, Mansholt had remedied Kelly's problematic financial situation by guiding her around a Commission-wide hiring freeze to an opening with the Economic and Social Committee. Kelly's decade-long career as a Eurocrat was underway. Her two-year love affair with Mansholt began with a romantic rendezvous in New York City the following summer.Footnote ³⁹

Kelly and Mansholt's thirty-nine-year gap in age made them something of an odd couple romantically. Their drastically different political backgrounds also seemed to set them apart. Yet during the early 1970s, Petra Kelly and Sicco Mansholt became devoted lovers and close political collaborators. Described by his biographer as a “founding father of the European Union,” Mansholt was a career politician best known for his important work as lead author of the EEC's archly bureaucratic and economically driven Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).Footnote ⁴⁰ This policy, which Gillingham has argued cannot simply be dismissed as “merely a regrettable diversion of the constructive purposes of integration” but must be seen in terms of its “destructive influence on the evolution of Community institutions,” surely was not representative of the accessible, unbureaucratic Europe that Kelly advocated.Footnote ⁴¹ By the time Mansholt met Kelly in 1972, however, the Dutchman was yearning for a more inclusive and more accessible version of Europe. In fact, Mansholt's vision for Europe had changed to such an extent by the 1970s that Kelly nicknamed him “Mr. New Europe.” In an article she wrote about him that was published in the United Nations' Vista magazine in 1973, Kelly described Mansholt's new plan to strengthen and reorganize the EEC as no less than an attempt at “forging new political foundations for Europe.” Kelly explained that “Mr. New Europe” was approaching this project by “turning his massive energies” toward the struggle “to get the people involved at every local level.”Footnote ⁴²

Despite, or perhaps precisely because of their long-time focus on Brussels, the involvement of the people “at every local level” seemed necessary for the future of the European project to Kelly, JEF activists, and even “Mr. New Europe” himself. Without widespread public involvement, this small circle of integrationists reasoned, Europe did not really offer an alternative way of doing politics. Yet the political tactics used by these privileged integrationists seemed disconnected from their goals of widespread involvement. Orbiting Brussels, the distant Belgian city that doubled as capital of Europe, neither Kelly nor her allies were in close contact with the people at the grass roots they all hoped to win over to the European cause. Even if Kelly was successful in dusting off the “direct election proposals” that she claimed had been “yellowing in the desk drawers” of “politicians of the old-rank-and-file” since 1958, there was little reason to believe that local people across the continent would jump to become involved in the Europe of Kelly, the JEF, and Mansholt.Footnote ⁴³ Despite their good intentions, Kelly and her colleagues were committing the same mistake for which she had so harshly criticized the German student movement. The significant discrepancy between their inclusive statements and the exclusive nature of their political activism remained as these Brussels-based integrationists focused their attention on the European ramifications of the imminent energy crisis.

Nuclear Power Politics in Brussels and Bonn

Many scholars have attributed growing opposition to nuclear power to the “value change” that purportedly caused youth throughout the developed west to focus on “post-material” concerns during the 1970s.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to this explanation, anti-nuclear protest belonged to an unpredicted “new, broad wave of protest movements … sparked not by the traditional problems of the capitalist order, which had so recently been repolarized by the student movement, but rather by problems of social reproduction.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Such an explanation of anti-nuclear protest helps to differentiate 1970s activism from the student movement of the 1960s, but its very emphasis on the novelty and unpredictability of “post-material” protest shrouds the origins of this new, broad wave of protest in mystery. In political centers such as Brussels and Bonn, however, energy policy had long been a hot topic, and this issue was anything but novel or “post-material.” Nevertheless, by the middle of the decade, Kelly and her colleagues had come to understand the choice to develop nuclear technology as more than an economic decision. With the help of American scientific research and the actions of grassroots protesters in Europe, they began to articulate this choice as one between two types of society.

Mere months after the publication of Kelly's Vista article, the 1973 oil shock brought the debate about the economization of energy into the political mainstream and gave the concept of “energy independence” a new significance. “Only nuclear energy,” Dieter Rucht has argued, “presented itself as a solution to these dilemmas.” In the mid-1970s, nuclear power was considered “the only technologically realistic, economically competitive, and long-term alternative to oil.”Footnote ⁴⁶ West Germany's eager acceptance of the nuclear solution was evident in the country's 1973 Energy Program, which called for an increase of nuclear energy consumption from one percent of the nation's total in 1973 to fifteen percent by 1985, a goal that would require the construction of forty new nuclear plants over the next decade.Footnote ⁴⁷ Beyond being seen as a resolution to the twin dilemmas of global oil shortages and international energy dependence, nuclear power was becoming a crucial West German industry in its own right. By the early 1970s, the Federal Republic had become the world's second-largest exporter of nuclear technology.Footnote ⁴⁸ For Bonn economic policy makers, in other words, expanding the FRG's nuclear program seemed an ideal path back to the economic heights of the postwar Wirtschaftswunder.

Despite all this excitement, Petra Kelly and Sicco Mansholt remained skeptical of nuclear energy's potential. In her article for Vista, Kelly had traced the origins of Mansholt's plan for a “New Europe” to the Club of Rome's 1972 publication The Limits to Growth, a slim volume billed by its authors as a study of the “central, long-term problems of modern man.” Citing a speech given by UN Secretary General U Thant, the Club defined these “central, long-term problems” as “the arms race, environmental degradation, the population explosion, and economic stagnation.”Footnote ⁴⁹ According to the study's authors, a continuation of the current trends in “world population, industrialization, food production, and resource depletion” would lead to a “rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity” sometime “within the next one hundred years.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This bleak forecast for the future of humanity led Mansholt to “the conclusion that new economic priorities not based solely on material growth are called for.”Footnote ⁵¹ The new economic priorities Mansholt laid out shortly after becoming president of the EEC responded directly to the long-term problems described in The Limits to Growth. Chief among them were reform of food production, economization of energy and raw materials, re-urbanization, and encouragement of the use of recycled materials. Though these new economic priorities did not indict nuclear power in and of themselves, they did call into question the wisdom of a headlong rush toward an unproven technology aimed only at continuing the unstoppable economic growth that had defined the postwar boom. For Mansholt, the decision to adopt nuclear power was a decision about both economic priorities and the future shape of European society.

Mansholt's critical stance toward nuclear power was tempered by Petra Kelly's exploration of the debate about nuclear power in the United States, where experts began to voice their dissent years before the issue was publicly contested in Europe.Footnote ⁵² Kelly herself had been aware of American opposition to nuclear power since she attended a meeting about the hazardous effects of nuclear radiation hosted by consumer advocate Ralph Nader in 1970.Footnote ⁵³ In 1974, several trips to her parents' home in Virginia for kidney treatment offered Kelly the opportunity to gather materials from the scientifically focused nuclear debate in the U.S. She explained to a correspondent that she was staying up until 3 or 4 a.m. each night to study “the tremendous piles of materials [on nuclear power] that one must work through in order to really understand the topic and also to have all the necessary arguments ready.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The countless early morning hours that Kelly devoted to her piles of materials were reflected in her remarkable command of the facts in the nuclear energy debate. Because “no internal elite dissent or agency rivalry coalesced with parts of the public to question aspects or even the whole direction” of Germany's nuclear project, the findings of dissenting American nuclear physicists that Kelly studied so closely and brought back to Europe added a new facet to nuclear power politics on the continent.Footnote ⁵⁵ In essence, Kelly used another transnational “trick of vision” to incorporate American ideas into European politics.

The “tremendous piles of materials” that Kelly endeavored to master allowed her to expand on the physical dangers of radiation by taking the social consequences of nuclear technology into account. The extremely high levels of radiation measured by American atomic physicists near fast-breeder reactors, for example, were cause enough for them to denounce the construction of fast-breeders as a “Faustian pact.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet the prospect of widespread reliance on these plutonium-producing reactors led Kelly to see the adoption of fast-breeders as a threat to European democracy, as well. Plans to develop fast-breeder technology, she claimed, would lead to the creation of “large stockpiles [of nuclear fuel] and spent nuclear fuel elements … from which crude homemade bombs could be made.” Given the “recent plague” of terrorism in Europe, Kelly wondered how “satisfactory protection and control” of dangerous nuclear materials would be feasible “within a pluralistic democratic Europe in the future.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In effect, Kelly argued, fast-breeder reactors would require a corps of “trained guerilla troops to protect the many reactors we will soon have.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The incompatibility of real democracy with the type of security necessary to safeguard dangerous stockpiles of nuclear fuel led Kelly to ask one “insurmountable question.” How, she wanted to know, could one “make people SAFE for a [sic] nuclear power generation short of total robotization?”Footnote ⁵⁹ By expanding on their ideas about the threat posed by nuclear technology, Kelly used the findings of dissenting American physicists to equate decisions about nuclear power with central choices about the future form of European society.

The introduction to a 1978 guide for potential anti-nuclear activists echoed Kelly's absolutist assessment of the deep social consequences of increased reliance on nuclear technology: “We begin from the assertions that different visions of society are behind the debate about atomic power, and that the outcome of this conflict is, in the end, a question of economic and political power, and not only scientific arguments.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Kelly's fear of the broad changes that nuclear power would effect on European society, and Mansholt's understanding of nuclear power as a means to prevent the implementation of new economic priorities go to the heart of the assertion that “different visions of society are behind the debate about nuclear power.” Acceptance of nuclear technology indicated an implicit adherence to “old economic priorities,” despite their potential costs for European democracy and their effect on the freedoms of Europe's people. Rejection of nuclear technology, on the other hand, was a move toward Mansholt's “new economic priorities,” and a new “fission-free economy built on sound and sustainable alternative power sources.”Footnote ⁶¹ Despite these deep ramifications, Kelly remained hard-pressed to articulate her alternative vision for Europe's future in a way that resonated with the continent's citizens. It was not until Kelly and Forum E editor Jo Leinen visited a grassroots anti-nuclear demonstration in March 1975 that they found a functioning model of the “fission-free economy” they considered so necessary for Europe's future, a model designed by the very people they had so long hoped to integrate into the European project.

“Aha Effect:” The Convergence of Grassroots Activism and European Integrationism

At the grassroots level, too, concerns about nuclear power stemmed from traditional “material” issues.Footnote ⁶² In the southwestern corner of Germany, farmers and vintners became worried about “the additional number of foggy days” that they believed steam discharge from a reactor planned for the village of Wyhl would create. More fog was considered a significant threat to the growth of grapes and tobacco, the region's two principle cash crops.Footnote ⁶³ The concerns local people raised about their livelihoods in response to the Wyhl project could hardly have been unexpected by government planners.Footnote ⁶⁴ As historian Sandra Chaney has shown, local opposition to hydropower projects had pitted local people against utilities companies in southwestern Germany for most of the twentieth century. Dispute over a proposed dam on the Wutach river, for example, had spanned from the Weimar Republic into the 1950s. Beginning in 1928, the Wutach region's “communities, businessmen, and farmers” had banded together to seek “financial redress for material losses” they believed the project would cause.Footnote ⁶⁵ Such local protest and coalition building was a clear precedent for the locally focused anti-reactor campaigns of the early 1970s. Yet the way that the anti-nuclear movement quickly spread across the entire Federal Republic was quite different from the limited local protest campaigns of earlier decades. It was in their attempts to grow this local movement beyond its immediate context that Petra Kelly and her internationally minded colleagues found a means of connecting to local people and began to move away from the bureaucracy of Brussels.

In fall 1974, Forum E editor Jo Leinen learned from friends that “in Baden and the Alsace a protest movement against atomic power plants was growing, with links across the Rhine.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The international circumstances of this grassroots protest movement made it perfect material for the JEF magazine. Leinen quickly canvassed Forum E contributors for article ideas. When Petra Kelly got word of Leinen's proposal, she was about to leave Brussels for a short trip to Washington, D.C. Hurriedly, Kelly typed out an excited reply to Leinen's query. Kelly's letter supplied Forum E with a long list of potential sources for interviews and materials on both sides of the Atlantic, ranging from a trade union leader opposed to the introduction of nuclear power in Ireland, to Dutch opponents of the planned Kalkar reactor, to the German “pro-industry” Atomforum organization, to Ralph Nader and the American “Nuclear Moratorium” movement.Footnote ⁶⁷ All of these contacts were culled from Kelly's personal Rolodex. Even before nuclear energy was a hot topic in Europe, Kelly stood near the center of an expanding, international network of “anti-uranium, anti-atom, and anti-atomic-power initiatives.” Yet Kelly's contacts did not include the “less predictable types” of activists who were protesting at Wyhl. In the context of nuclear power, just like the wider European project, Kelly lacked access to the people at the local level whose participation she had long ago deemed essential to meaningful politics. The largely autonomous, locally organized protest movement in Baden and the Alsace proved to be an entry point into grassroots anti-nuclear activism. It was by coming into contact with local activists at Wyhl that Kelly and Leinen would finally connect their ideas about United Europe and the need for “new economic priorities” with the people “at every local level.”

By the time the staff of Forum E had finally assembled the magazine's “Nuclear Issue,” the protest movement on the French-German border had already made international headlines. On February 23, 1975, the reactor construction site at Wyhl was occupied by 28,000 demonstrators. For those who were unfamiliar with the years of struggle and organizing that had preceded this massive site occupation, the sheer number of protesters present at this remote village was unimaginable.Footnote ⁶⁸ Thus, the anti-nuclear movement seemed to explode onto the stage with the Wyhl site occupation. In Brussels, Kelly's press clippings file soon swelled with articles detailing the occupation of the construction site and its consequences.Footnote ⁶⁹ In one article, Kelly underlined a comment made by the mayor of Strasbourg. “If the nuclear plant at Wyhl is stopped,” the mayor quipped, “it would be extremely difficult to put one into the Alsace. If you can't do it here, where can you do it in France? I believe the entire French nuclear program rides with Wyhl.”Footnote ⁷⁰ For Kelly, the significance of the mayor's comment was clear: the movement at Wyhl was about more than one reactor. It was about more than the reactors in one country. In fact, if the mayor's comments were to be taken seriously, then the citizens of a tiny village nestled in the hills of southwestern Germany held the fate of European nuclear power in their hands. Given the stakes of this confrontation on the Upper Rhine, Kelly interpreted the grassroots struggle against the Wyhl reactor as the beginning of an alternative future for Europe.

It was for good reason that the mayor of Strasbourg was not alone in attributing international significance to the events at Wyhl. Despite the protest's local focus, the international nature of everything that happened at Wyhl was apparent to the local people occupying the reactor construction site. In 1969, the southwest German press was filled with reports about how French and Swiss plans to build a “pearl necklace” of reactors along the Rhine were threatening Baden-Württemberg's nascent nuclear program by using up all of the available cooling water.Footnote ⁷¹ Shortly after French plans for a nuclear plant in Alsatian Fesenheim were announced in 1970, the Baden-Württemberg state government made public its intent to build a reactor of its own at Breisach.Footnote ⁷² Opposition to these projects quickly transcended national borders, as villagers from both sides of the river came together to stand up against industrial construction projects in France and Germany.Footnote ⁷³ The participation of Swiss activists, too, in these struggles caused people all along the upper Rhine to dub their region “Dreyeckland” (“Three corner land”).Footnote ⁷⁴ Despite their seemingly local focus, then, the activists of Dreyeckland physically embodied the internationalist concept of Europe that Kelly and her colleagues in Brussels could only write about in the abstract.

It was in light of the growing consciousness of Wyhl as a European issue that Petra Kelly and Jo Leinen made their first visit to the disputed construction site on March 31, 1975. Attending an Easter Monday rally along with more than 10,000 demonstrators, Kelly, an unknown bureaucrat from Brussels, managed to get her name onto the speakers' list.Footnote ⁷⁵ Shortly after a speaker from nearby Kaiseraugst, Switzerland, invoked the spirit of Dreyeckland with an announcement that a reactor construction site just across the Swiss-German border had been occupied earlier that same day, Kelly addressed the mass of demonstrators.Footnote ⁷⁶ She opened her speech ironically, describing herself as a representative of “the profit-addicted EEC.” There in Brussels, she declared, “we are waiting for Wyhl.” Offering greetings from Sicco Mansholt, Kelly noted that the former EEC president had sent telegrams to numerous German government officials in support of the Wyhlers' actions.Footnote ⁷⁷ Kelly's short speech revealed her distance from the campaign at Wyhl even as it established her support for the Wyhlers and her high-level connections in Brussels. For Kelly, this was an important step toward connecting with Europe's “underprivileged.” Addressing the crowds at Wyhl, Kelly, the outsider from Brussels, seemed to have something to offer people at the grass roots.

Immediately after Kelly spoke, many of the demonstrators rushed off to join the growing occupation at Kaiseraugst.Footnote ⁷⁸ As Kelly and Leinen left Dreyeckland for the first time, they were in awe of the international movement against nuclear power they had encountered in this rural region. For Leinen, the visit had an “aha effect.” It was on the way home, he recalls, that he and Kelly realized that “atomic energy would divide society.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The activism of local people in Dreyeckland, in other words, was evidence of the drastic ramifications for European democracy that Kelly had suggested were attached to decisions about the future of nuclear energy. For Kelly and Leinen, Dreyeckland suggested a locally rooted sustainable future for Europe. Such a model stood in stark contrast to the endless economic growth promised by proponents of nuclear power. Thus, anti-nuclear protest at Wyhl suggested to Kelly and Leinen a path toward European integration that circumvented the Brussels Eurocracy.

Kelly revealed the extent to which she had been personally affected by her visit to Wyhl in a November 1975 letter to the West European Socialists. Kelly suggested three new “possibilities for action” to this left-leaning integrationist group. The first possibility, which Kelly placed under the heading “Europe and Nuclear fission centers: GRASSROOTS RESISTANCE!!!!!,” was obviously linked to her recent experience in Dreyeckland. Kelly described the “resistance in the Wyhl region” as a sign of a “transnational consciousness” and argued that the West European Socialists should get into dialogue with grassroots opponents of nuclear power to “put to use collected experiences in joint transnational actions.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In Kelly's eyes at least, the highly effective border-crossing protests in Dreyeckland had much to teach even the cosmopolitan West European Socialists. Instead of continuing to develop ideas intended to draw people from “every local level” into the orbit of Brussels, Kelly shifted her tactics. Now she was asking the cosmopolitan Brussels-based Euro-elite to follow the lead of the locally focused farmers of Wyhl. Just as she had exclaimed in her speech at the Easter Monday rally, Brussels had indeed been “waiting for Wyhl.”

Kelly's call for the West European Socialists to learn from the farmers at Wyhl evoked the irony of the relationship between Dreyeckland and Europe. Kelly described this relationship in an open letter addressed to “All within the European Communities” in late March 1975. “While in Wyhl, Germany, thousands of Germans, French, and Swiss citizens have demonstrated peacefully on the site of a future nuclear reactor,” Kelly reminded the readers of her open letter, “there has not yet taken place the political discussion with all its implications at the European level!”Footnote ⁸¹ Following the “aha effect” of her first trip to Wyhl, Kelly became less and less interested in the goings-on in Brussels and more and more dedicated to the grassroots struggles against nuclear reactors taking place across the continent.

The idea that “backwards” Dreyeckland, a rural region consisting mainly of farms and vineyards, had taken the lead in determining the future of nuclear power in Europe may have seemed preposterous to politically savvy West European Socialists and the energy-obsessed EEC leadership in Brussels. Yet for Kelly, who had shared in Jo Leinen's Wyhl revelation and who increasingly considered herself exiled among the Brussels “Eurocrats,” it was much easier to accept the leadership of the Wyhl demonstrators in articulating an alternative vision for Europe. She explained this acceptance by building on the words of Albert Einstein:

Following her visit to Wyhl, Kelly made up her mind to “carry the facts about nuclear energy” to village squares across Germany, throughout Europe, and eventually all around the world. As at Wyhl, she used her position in Brussels as a way onto the agenda. But rather than peddling the viewpoint of the “profit-addicted EEC” or even that of her “New European” colleagues to those she addressed, Kelly claimed that she now sought the “responsiveness” of local people. When direct elections to the European Parliament were finally called for June 1979, Petra Kelly believed she had found a forum where “Europe's voice” would be heard loud and clear.

From the Occupied Site to Parliament: Building Europe from the Grass Roots Up

Among scholars of Die Grünen, the enduring image of the 1979 elections to the European Parliament is as a dress rehearsal for the party's 1983 entrance into the Bundestag. In this interpretation, the chief importance of the 1979 Euro-campaign for Kelly and her fledgling party was the 4.9 million DM campaign expense reimbursement earned by Sonstige Politische Vereinigung Die Grünen, or SPV Die Grünen (Miscellaneous Political Association The Greens), because these funds bankrolled Die Grünen's numerous electoral campaigns during the early 1980s.Footnote ⁸³ Yet Kelly described direct elections to the European Parliament as an end in themselves. For her, the 1979 campaign was an opportunity to stage a “decisive battle against atomic power plants.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, it was in terms of the impending choice between a future focused solely on material growth and a sustainable, fission-free Europe that Kelly understood the European elections. In essence, then, it was through the newly accessible political framework of Europe that Kelly hoped to make the construction of a powerful new political coalition outside the nationally focused traditions of the Left possible. And it was toward this goal that she had been working throughout the decade.

For Kelly, the “people at every local level” were essential to this vision because their grassroots action outlined a new political model that circumvented both the stifling factionalism of the Left and the entrenched Eurocracy of Brussels. By following Einstein's suggestion and carrying her version of the “facts of atomic energy” to the village square, Kelly hoped to redirect the anti-nuclear movement toward Strasbourg via the 1979 elections. At a 1975 rally against the fast-breeder reactor under construction in the north German village of Kalkar, Kelly stood in the middle of the town's idyllic marketplace and voiced her concerns about the “European federal guerilla troops” that she feared would be needed to defend functioning reactors from terrorist threats and the decreasing importance of human beings in an increasingly technological society. Yet she concluded her speech by describing the actions of local anti-nuclear activists as representative of a sorely needed alterative vision for Europe. “Whether in Wyhl or Kaiseraugst or Kalkar,” Kelly exclaimed, “there is an ever-growing solidarity, an ecological self-consciousness in border regions.” Anti-nuclear activism in each of these local, yet international settings, Kelly continued, marked “a way toward peace and nonviolence,” and proved the need “to build a transnational, nonviolent, simple, humane Europe.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In praising the work of local opponents of nuclear power, Kelly emphasized the internationalist dimensions of their activism, describing it as the beginnings of a new Europe that had been imagined from the grass roots up.

Key to this vision's value for Kelly was its internationalism. Kelly saw anti-nuclear demonstrations, despite their local focus, as invaluable opportunities for developing transnational connections and building European solidarity. She lambasted a German organization that directed a February 1977 anti-nuclear rally held in the town of Itzehoe for the demonstration's lack of “an international or transnational element.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In failing to report on “Wyhl court proceedings, Danish [anti-nuclear] activities, or about the seminar in Malville [France], or about the EEC proceedings regarding the issue of site selection,” the organizers of the Itzehoe rally had allowed “40,000 prepared anti-nuclear activists [to] come for nothing.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Unlike the Itzehoe rally's organizers, Kelly saw successfully organized anti-nuclear demonstrations themselves as the potential birthplaces of a diverse international political coalition. “On the occupied site,” Kelly claimed, “rocket technicians, uranium miners, secretaries in atomic power centers, housewives, scientists” all could learn to speak with one another and agree to “nonviolent resistance against the overstepping of the bounds of humanity.” Creating this new coalition, she continued, was the key to unleashing “political and social chain reactions such as Lip, Larzac, Marckolsheim, Wyhl, Brokdorf, and Kaiseraugst.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In locating the source of political and social power at the grass roots, Petra Kelly demonstrated just how great a role she believed that local protest by “less predictable types” of activists could play in reforging European society.

Yet Kelly also saw an important role for herself and other European integrationists in managing this powerful chain reaction. Grassroots activists had taken the idea of a new, international Europe from theory to practice at the local level, but it was up to Kelly and her Brussels-based colleagues to redirect their actions toward Strasbourg, the seat of the European Parliament. In describing the upcoming “direct elections to the European Parliament” as an electoral contest that could be made “into a decisive battle against atomic power plants,” Kelly made clear her intent to marshal locally focused activists toward the halls of a distant and largely powerless parliament.Footnote ⁸⁹ In her own opinion at least, Kelly's experience networking various locally focused protest campaigns qualified her for a leading role in this decisive battle against atomic power.

Kelly capitalized on her “long and intensive involvement within the anti-atomic, peace, and women's movements in west Europe since 1970” by describing it as her chief qualification for the role of lead candidate in the newly formed SPV Die Grünen.Footnote ⁹⁰ As a “Miscellaneous Political Association” featuring an “anti-nuclear Wahlmotiv” rather than a traditional political party with a well-articulated program, this group was clearly open to a new style of politics.Footnote ⁹¹ For Kelly, this new organization was a perfect vehicle to further her own plans to capitalize on grassroots anti-nuclear activism. In her explanation of the role she hoped to play as “number one candidate on the Ecological Ticket,” Kelly made her understanding of the way that SPV Die Grünen could contribute to her vision for Europe clear. She was stepping forward with this new organization, she announced, in order to represent an alternative vision for European society, to “build Europe from BELOW and not from ABOVE.” In fact, Kelly viewed her experience in Brussels chiefly as an in-depth look at all that was wrong with Europe. In Brussels, Kelly wrote, she had “known all too long the Europe of the soulless technocrats and the Europe of traditional power-and-hierarchy thinking.” She now intended to “speak up for a decentralized, non/nuclear, non/military [sic], and gentle Europe—a Europe of the Regions and of the People.”Footnote ⁹² Yet rather than standing behind grassroots activists from Dreyeckland or any of the other sites of local resistance, Kelly and other formerly Brussels-focused European integrationists stepped forward to advocate a decentralized, regional vision based on local people's activism.

When the coalition chose its candidates for the European elections at its founding congress at Frankfurt am Main in March 1979, Kelly successfully convinced the assembled delegates that she ought to head up the slate, beating out even “the most prominent of the green [sic], Mr. Herbert Gruhl who had left the establishment in order to join the ecological movement.”Footnote ⁹³ Kelly's triumph over Gruhl, whom Christoph Becker-Schaum has argued “did more than any other individual to lay the foundations for the Green party” and who was well known throughout West Germany after his highly visible resignation from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and departure from the Bundestag in 1977, is a clear sign of her support within this new party.Footnote ⁹⁴ That Kelly's JEF colleague Roland Vogt, whom she had touted as a candidate because “he also worked through ideas about the ecology movement's role in the European direct elections and the future Europe (alternative Europe) very early,” won the second position on the Green slate is further evidence of the support for both Kelly and her ideas at the Frankfurt Congress.Footnote ⁹⁵ Perhaps even more significantly, the fact that it was Kelly, Gruhl, and Vogt who were vying for these positions, rather than grassroots activists from Wyhl or Kalkar, reveals the extent to which Kelly and her colleagues capitalized on the ideas and actions of local people in order to further their struggle for an alternative Europe.

Though SPV Die Grünen did not receive enough votes to overcome German election law's “five percent hurdle” and win representation in Strasbourg, Kelly and Vogt attempted to bring the chain reaction of protest to parliament on their own. Shortly after the election, the two ex-candidates unfurled a banner in the gallery of the European Parliament's plenary hall, protesting the fact that they had not been seated in parliament despite the 3.2 percent of the German vote earned by SPV Die Grünen.Footnote ⁹⁶ By attempting to recreate the dynamics of “the occupied site” within the halls of parliament, Kelly and Vogt were knocking on the doors of the European establishment as representatives of an alternative Europe envisioned by grassroots anti-nuclear activists. Kelly's politics had come full circle.