Left-wing Violence and State Response: United States, Germany, Italy and Japan, 1960s-1990s

Peter J. Katzenstein

Institute for European Studies

January 1998

The depression, fascism, World War II and the mobilization for the Cold War during the 1950s had blocked the Left in the United States, Germany, Italy and Japan. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s things began visibly to change. The transfer of power from Eisenhower to Kennedy signalled an important generational and ideological shift in the United States. In Germany the Bad Godesberg program ratified in 1959 the SPD's transition from Socialism to Social Democracy. Italy's Nenni Socialists entered government in 1963, three years before the German SPD joined with the CDU/CSU in a coalition government. Only in Japan did the Socialist and Communist parties remain excluded from government. But starting in 1958 over a proposed revision of the Police Law and culminating in 1960 in a series of massive demonstrations protesting the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty Japan's Left not only forced Prime Minister Kishi's resignation but also a fundamental reorientation in the LDP's political strategy away from constitutional revision towards economic growth.

1. A Brief History

As the Old Left began to move closer towards power or compel those in power, as in Japan, to radically revise their strategies, political space began to open in all four societies for new oppositional forces. The New Left in the United States led the way, starting in 1962 with the SDS and the civil rights movement, the Puerto Rico Socialist Party and the Black Nationalist movement. Germany's and Italy's student movements began to take shape between 1964 and 1966. And during the mid-1960s Japan's New Left, a proven political force since the demonstrations of 1960, strengthens its political organization.

In the second half of the 1960s the anti-war movement leads to a rapid growth of New Left movements in all four societies and to the emergence and splintering of radical groups, some of which move underground by the early 1970s. These groups share four attributes. They originate in left-wing protest movements; they propagate armed guerilla warfare; they use violence against state authorities and business leaders; and they are defined by state officials as a left-wing extremist threat.

In Germany an irrevocable split between the movement and the Red Army Faction (RAF) occurs in 1971. By 1972 the first generation of RAF leaders is in prison spurring successive generations of activists to ever greater violence in preparation for the "hot autumn" of 1977, a cataclysm of violence which culminated in the murder of a high-placed business leader, Martin Schleyer, and the coordinated suicide of the original RAF leaders in prison after German security forces had successfully seized a hijacked Lufthansa jet on the tarmac of the Mogadishu airport.

A bomb planted by right-wing extremists, killing 27 and wounding 1,988, exploded in Milan on December 12, 1969. The violent confrontation between left-wing activists and the state occurred later than in Germany. By 1969-70 the mass movement began to cede ground and the Red Brigades are formed in the fall of 1970. When they move underground in 1972, however, in contrast to Germany, the Italian government regards the Brigades as a lesser threat than the worker and student movement that Italy's powerful Communist Party leads. Terrorism in the early 1970s, perpetrated by neo-fascists in response to intense social conflict, is primarily a product of the Right that gradually escalates by the actions of extremists from both sides of the political spectrum. While right-wing violence was particularly strong between 1969-74 left-wing violence peaked between 1977 and 1979. Residual groupings survive into the 1980s. But as early as 1981 underground, violence-prone groups are weakening significantly.

Initially the government acted with great hesitation although there is strong evidence for the cooperation between right-wing extremists and parts of the secret police. With sporadic success only in the mid-1970s after the police had created, and subsequently quickly disbanded, special anti-terrorist squads made most of the arrests, numbering in the thousands. The government also responds symbolically by passing emergency legislation that enhances police powers and curtails civil liberties. The main success of the police comes after 1979, when in response to the "premial law" many militants decide to declare that their experience with "armed struggle" was over or to collaborate with police and judicial investigations in exchange for reduced penalties.

Building on the experience of the early and late 1950s in Japan, the mobilization of large-scale, violent demonstrations in which students and young workers clash with the police in the late 1960s prepares the ground for Japan's Red Army Faction to go underground in 1969. The Red Army moved from the violence of Molotov cocktails thrown during some of the mass demonstrations to home-made pipebomb grenades before turning their sights abroad. One group hijacked a domestic plane for North Korea in 1970. A second formed in Lebanon under PLO protection in 1970-71 and carried out a series of successful and highly visible international actions during the 1970s, resurfacing occasionally also inside Japan. Those remaining in Japan became totally delegitimate after a robbery campaign, a deadly internal purge, and a ten-days hostage incident in a mountain lodge that captivated the attention of the Japanese public. As the Red Army ceased its domestic activities, other groups with more deadly weapons emerged. The East Asia Anti-Japanese Armed Front, for example, targeted Japanese corporations responsible for the wartime victimization of other Asian countries; it was responsible for the death of 300 and the injuries of thousands in the bombing of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries headquarters in 1974. For almost two decades other groups sought to delay the construction and subsequent expansion of Tokyo's Narita airport. By the late 1980s some of these groups were also involved in rocket attacks on the Imperial Palace grounds, Shinto shrines associated with the emperor and the war, and railroad sabotage. Through two international hostage incidents in 1975 and 1977 the Red Army obtained the release of several activists who had been involved in these domestic actions.

The Japanese government refused to respond in any way to the issues that were central to the protest movement. It relied on a highly controlled police response to large-scale collective action using massed manpower and just enough force necessary for containment while avoiding deadly weapons. The police developed intensive and intrusive surveillance methods of individuals; and it experimented with various forms of personal harassment and stigmatization that increased significantly the cost for any individual participation in collective action or underground activities. Finally the police and the judiciary escalate the conflict in the prisons, within very generous limits of bureaucratic discretion, to keep activists imprisoned with more serious charges, severe isolation, and longer sentences thus breaking the ties between leaders and the rest of the movement.

In the United States the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) consistently eschew violence throughout the 1960s, causing eventually a split with the Weathermen in 1969. This initiates a brief phase of armed struggle in the early 1970s that is joined by groups such as the Black Liberation Army, the United Freedom Front, FALN, and the EPB Los Macheteros. Compared to the fragmentation of radical groups within a general Marxist paradigm in Germany, Italy and Japan, the influence of Marxism in the United States was much weaker. Only during a brief turn to violence in the 1970s does Marxism-Leninism make a quick appearance. But the specific ideological content of US radicalism was more shallow than in the other three states.

On the whole the United States experienced also less violence and repression and for a shorter period of time. The Weathermen, for example, were on the verge of bombing an army dance in April 1970, presumably killing GIs and their dates, when their bomb factory in a New York town house exploded. This accident provided a moment for reflection that the Weathermen, significantly, seized thus sparing the United States an intensified cycle of violence and repression. It is impossible to say whether the ability to draw back from the brink of violence is causally linked to the weakness of a Marxist tradition in the United States or the salience of the value of playing the game of politics by non-violent, democratic means; or whether it was just a historical accident.

A second clustering of sporadic and unconnected violent actions occurs in 1974-75 while the US government was in disarray during the Watergate hearings, preoccupied during the final stages of the war in Vietnam, and politically exposed publicly for having run COINTELPRO. Violence results from a radical prison reform movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s that involved incarcerated radicals. While a theoretical critique of the correctional system in the academy grows, some prison reform groups evolve into revolutionary cadres. After these inmates are released they either find the radical fringe of the protest movement and join existing groups or they form new ones, for example, the United Freedom Front or the Symbionese Liberation Army. Given their high level of revolutionary fervor, their lack of political and theoretical knowledge and their technical expertise derived from prior careers as criminals or members of the US military, this second generation of militant activists is central to the outbreak of sporadic violence during the mid-1970s.

The US state responded to left-wing violence in three distinct periods. During the first, COINTELPRO period (1969-74) the government adopted a broad-gauged effort to infiltrate and harass groups; it was immaterial whether they were engaged in violence or illegal activities. The intent of the policy was to draw a line between radical and moderate protest groups and to increase the costs for individuals choosing to cross the line between the two. The intensity of state repression was related to race. Black groups were singled out for the most severe form of repression; white groups were treated more leniently. Since it hardened the revolutionary core of the movement and convinced it, through direct exposure, of the repressive character of the liberal state, this government policy had an immediate causal effect on the subsequent emergence of a post-New Left clandestine organizations committed to overthrow the state with violence. Following the Watergate hearings and the revelation of COINTELPRO operations, the Carter Presidency took a more lenient approach. The power of the FBI was sharply reduced. Moderate social change groups received federal funding through the CECA program. And radical fugitives associated with militant underground organizations were encouraged to surface by the prospect of lenient sentences. The counterterrorism policy that the government adopted during the Reagan Presidency was tough but unlike COINTELPRO it only targeted specific organizations or individuals. Its goal was complete incapacitation. While the intent of the policy was to rebuild a muscular national security state at home under conservative auspices, in its implementation the policy was entirely efficiency-driven and had no discernible impact on the non-violent left or on new social movements.

The remarkable similarity in the emergence of left-wing radicalism in the four polities ends by the mid-1970s. In each society the deescalation of violence seems to be affected by a number of factors: if, when and how militants were captured; how they were treated once they were in prison; their reputation and standing within the Left; exit options from militancy in the form of amnesties, public repentance or early releases; and broad shifts in national and international contexts. A prison reform movement in the United States and protests over the conditions of Germany's incarcerated political prisoners are central for mobilizing radical groups in the underground and sympathizers committed to overthrowing the state by violent means. Preoccupied with international terrorism the US government wages an all-out war also on suspected domestic terrorists and imposes punitive prison conditions; by the late 1980s, the government has stamped out left-wing violence in the US. Germany's underground groups continue to assassinate highly placed individuals into the early 1990s. German unification leads to a rash of arrests of a number of former radicals whom the East German secret police had sheltered in the GDR in the 1980s, after they apparently had left underground terrorism for good.

In Italy violence abates in the early 1980s in response to the government's policies that offer leniency for surrendering to those in hiding and guilty pleas for those in prisons. With considerable reluctance and years delay, the German government follows in Italy's footsteps in the 1990s. Finally in Japan, luck, patience and the end of the Cold War all contribute to a series of arrests in the late 1980s and early 1990s and a sharp diminution of the threat that the RAF poses to the Japanese government. However, the police fails in stopping a number of spectacular symbolic acts of violence. Although domestic radicals continue to operate sporadically inside Japan, the police adopts a patient policy that seeks simply to let militants grow older while cutting them off from recruiting younger members.

This, in a nutshell, is the story of the rise and fall of left-wing violence and the state's reaction in the four countries between the 1960s and the 1990s. Despite striking similarities in the four national trajectories, especially in the mobilization and escalation phases, some specific national characteristics are worth pointing out. Distinctive of Japan, for example, is the early decision of the RAF to move offshore to evade police pressure. When challenged by mass protest and subsequently the violence of the Red Brigades the Italian state, for several years, steps beyond the democratic rule of law. Conversely, in the early 1980s Italy's flexible policy facilitates a relatively quick reintegration of former radicals. In Germany, by contrast, the law is not as easily bent either early or late, and German state security in the 1970s is protected by increasingly intrusive laws. Finally, distinctive of the United States is not the anti-war movement and its violent splinter groups but Black nationalist and Puerto Rican groups that approximate the model of internal colonialism.

This report takes an analytical perspective that embeds actors in institutionally defined processes. Without denying that they may also matter we pay less attention to psychological, national cultural, and broadly structural styles of analysis. The paper discusses: the similarities in the processes that lead from social movements to clandestine groups (section 2); similarities in the real and manufactured threat perceptions that inform government policies (section 3); the unintended consequences of group actions and government policies that intensified the chances for violence (section 4); differences in state-society relations and collective memories that prompted groups and governments to adopt different courses of action (section 5); and some implications for the new wave of violence that is being organized by the New Right in the 1990s (section 6).

2. Similarities in the Mobilization of Opposition: From Social Movement to Clandestine Group

Similar mobilization and escalation processes in the four societies lead from protest to violence. The critical threshold appears to have been the decision of some groups to move underground rather than the decision to commit violent acts. In all four societies the path to radical, clandestine activity results from processes that initially link political elites unwilling to consider the demands of oppositional social movements for reforming state and society. The relation between movement and groups varies. In Italy, for example, these groups radicalize tendencies that existed within the broader protest movement. In Germany they negate such movements moving instead rapidly into the abstract realm of international, anti-imperialist guerilla warfare. But in all cases escalation processes are the result of a polarization of political cultures and the fears by system supporters and opponents that the other side will soon betray democratic principles. Hard-line policies by governments create martyrs and myths and in the eyes of radical activists delegitimize those controlling the levers of state power. Repression encourages individuals to develop an even stronger commitment to his or her oppositional stance and political activism thus opening the door to political violence.

Processes of Mobilization and Escalation

The ideological and organizational source of these oppositional stances blend influences from the Old Left that was inspired by the promises of Soviet Communism, from the New Left with its inclination for direct action, and from new social movements whose legal and cultural forms of protest made state repression a problematic response. In Germany, Japan and Italy the 1960s student movement is the first sustained political challenge to the leadership of relatively young democracies. Hence political leaders interpret the dangers of protest and the threat to democracy in ways that encourage heavy-handed political and police action. Conversely, activists are relatively quick to place the conflict within national traditions that lack democratic experience and thus demand extreme vigilance and violent measures to oppose the recurrence of fascist tendencies. Revolutionary rhetoric quickly helps transform demands for political reform to fundamental conflicts over the nature of democratic government. Cold War tensions and conflicts projected from the two superpowers to the emergence of national liberation movements exacerbate further domestic political tensions. In the 1970s movement milieus in Italy, Germany and Japan encourage the tendency of radicals to view the government at home as the main enemy and revolutionary Third World groups abroad as allies.

In the 1970s small radical organizations espousing violence first evolve within and subsequently break away from larger, non-violent social movement organizations. These groups grow more radical eventually creating new cycles of violence. While some organizations, for example the SDS in the United States, succeed in moderating strategies and redefining objectives, others, for example Germany's Red Army Faction and June 2nd movement, consolidate and develop repertoires of radical action that spread violence. Entrepreneurs for violent action compete with one another in subcultures that thus become even more receptive for the reliance on violent tactics and that prepare militant, semi-clandestine organizations and their splinter groups for complete clandestinity.

Psychological and accidental factors determine which activists are recruited into clandestine politics. Activists which eventually are drawn to violence do not share specific family histories but exposures to a more general milieu. It is also very difficult to make a sharp distinction between those who join the movement because they are drawn to radical causes and those who subsequently engage in violence. Peer group pressure and the experience of mass protest movements as a total environment which connect one's personal life to politics is more important. Lovers, friends and acquaintances often provide entry for individuals into milieus that help them create specific identities within general political protest orientations. There exists then a general political climate and people lying in the wait who are drawn to violence often by no more than a series of accidents.

The commitment to violence is not so much a matter of individual, calculated choice as a group process. In which cohort an activist enters university or college, for example, matters a great deal since social context helps define individual choice. But the link between individuals and political cohorts is not direct. The vast majority of students in the early 1970s, after all, finishes their studies; and large numbers of movement activists drop out from protest politics. Furthermore a fine-grained analysis should distinguish between radical activists, their supporters, activists who move underground, and underground activists prepared to commit violence. Each of these is linked to specific social networks which move over time. Thresholds may well have existed in some cases. In the United States, for example, there is in 1970-71 a threshold in which activists, for reasons still too complex to unravel, draw back from a full-scale campaign of violence. And thresholds appear to have been much clearer in retrospective debates, for example, in Germany and Italy, about the events of the early 1970s than they were at the time. On balance the evidence suggests that individual "commitment to the cause" is less important than a series of accidental causes that conceal thresholds separating violent from non-violent action.

The perpetrators of violence are "normal" movement activists not distinguishable beforehand. The probability of being recruited into movement and group politics increases with participation in specific personal networks connected with movement and group activists. Most start their political careers in ordinary social movements or movement groups. Although often indistinguishable at the outset, left-wing activists often emerge from milieus that serve as connectors between movement and semi-clandestine groups. Accidental factors mattered greatly: attending a certain school, living in a specific neighborhood, joining a specific demonstration, and chance encounters with movement milieus, organizations and individuals often have a disproportionate influence on future propensity for violence.

In their biographies militants who end up underground are not easily described either as "children of the victims" or "children of the perpetrators" of fascist atrocities. But there exists a different kind of generational effect. While the founding members of the underground groups often come from the first generation of movement activists, most of their recruits are drawn from successive generations of militants who are socialized into politics when conflicts have already escalated to higher levels of violence. Often, though not always, the second generation is very young. And compared to the first the second generation is more willing to rely on violent means. But distinctions between first and second generations, marking as they do clear watersheds, conceal continuous micro-links between successive student generations, rather than life-cycle generations, which maintain a continuous personal transfer of institutional memory of the skills and symbols for violent action.

The most militant groups attracted activists already experienced in the use of violent forms of political action holding a concept of politics indebted to direct action rather than political bargaining. In most of these groups attempts fail that aim at maintaining simultaneously public and legal as well as clandestine and illegal operations. Militant wings split off so that they can experiment without organizational restrictions. In this process groups experience a specific spiral of radicalization, subsequent isolation, and further radicalization, which makes them increasingly ingrown as they relinquish the imagery and political language they used to share with specific movement subcultures. Increasingly caught in self-constructed versions of political reality, specifically in their growing identification with militant opposition to the governing elites in state and society, group members lose their sense of the constraints of external reality and the ability to foresee the consequences of their actions.

These processes make small radical groups ripe for shifting to complete clandestinity, a move often precipitated by a violent chance event that propels group members underground in order to escape arrest or other forms of what they regard as growing state repression. The culminating moment for moving underground caps an escalation process that includes several stages: the radicalization over time of activists due to ideological transformations; shifts in the moral emergency associated with a protracted conflict such as the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement; the prolonged experience of social protest itself; increasing skepticism about the possibilities of meaningful political change through non-violent means; direct experience with violence in the context of mass demonstrations and police reaction; the creation of martyrs such as people killed at Kent State in the United States and Benno Ohnesorg in Germany; the limited or escalating repression experienced by non-violent activists; the growing emphasis in radical subcultures on risk taking and violence as markers of revolutionary "authenticity;" the adoption of activists and state officials of undifferentiated views of the other as absolute enemies; the isolation of violence-prone activists within their own movements; and the contradictory beliefs of activists in the exemplary nature of violence on the one hand and the impossibility of radicalizing "the masses" on the other. In sum, escalation processes leading to the underground involve a progressive militarization of the conflict, growing commitment to abstract and non-realizable goals, intensification in the vilification of the state, and growing political isolation.

Such processes are sustained or intensified once a group moves underground. To be sure, even in the underground individuals may still have a chance to turn back as is true of several U.S. radicals. Trying to elude capture, they at times choose to avoid radical activities, reevaluate the ethics and politics of armed struggle, and progressively remove themselves from violence. Thus one time bomber Jane Alpert discovers feminism in the underground. But US groups lack the ideological depth of those found in Germany, Italy and Japan. There internal dynamics largely take over once the group has gone underground. The ability to adjust to changing conditions is now sharply reduced and the sense of political reality weakens. Confronted by powerful state bureaucracies focused on their elimination, escalating conflicts cause these groups to lose what measure of solidarity from broader movements they had initially enjoyed. Hence mere organizational survival eventually becomes more important than any of the group's original goals. The struggle for securing the necessary means for survival (such as a hard-core of active sympathizers, money, hideouts, cars) isolates clandestine groups further from the social movements in which they had arisen. The compartementalization of organizational structures and ideological abstractness in most instances leads to a very high attrition rate for underground groups. In sum, the entrepreneurs of violence unleash political forces that they can not control and that make long-term survival almost impossible. While the timing of the process of dissolution is dictated largely by political conditions that shape the degree of isolation of the underground groups, it remains true that the main organizational characteristics of radical groups develop after rather than before they move underground.

Anti-Americanism and Third World Liberation Movements

A virulent form of anti-Americanism is an important element in the mobilization of mass protest against the Vietnam war. Germany, Japan and Italy share to different degrees in their status as client states of the United States during the Cold War. They are not only political and military allies but had been the subject of considered US efforts to organize artificial revolutions through policies of reeducation that would force the former Axis powers, and in particular Germany and Japan, onto the road to freedom. In contrast to Germany, in Japan the legitimacy of US bases is a political issue and personal contact US forces are restricted. And since Japan itself had occupied Vietnam only two decades earlier, opposition against the Vietnam war is less about being "right" in an abstract, moral sense and more about being dragged into an American war. The anti-Americanism of Germany's Left is not nationalist. In fact, in contrast to their parents members of Germany's New Left are strongly attracted by American mass culture whose various products it consumes avidly. Rather German fascism and American imperialism are seen as close cousins and Germany's anti-democratic and repressive government is linked to an international context dominated by the United States. The political fight against the war in Vietnam and against the German government is thus a morally righteous one. Italy's anti-Americanism is more muted. In the early postwar years it was in fact not clear whether the US had come to liberate or occupy the country. The US navy had a relatively invisible presence. And, in contrast to Germany and the United States, Italy had a well-organized Communist working class which made the search for foreign symbols less urgent. Finally the anti-Americanism of the US New Left is influenced not only by foreign travel but also by the powerful experience of the civil rights movement which helped prepare the ground for the subsequent framing of the police as "pigs" during the anti-war demonstrations of the late 1960s.

Anti-Americanism is linked to a broader engagement with Third World liberation movements. In the late 1960s the New Left and mass protest movements spring to life in affluent, post-industrial societies that for all intents and purposes had solved the Marxist problem of how to integrate the working class into democratic, capitalist welfare societies. Lacking a persuasive domestic model for how to organize Third World national liberation movements offer yo left-wing radicals a transnational reference point and model for political action as well as concrete sources of support. The Third World enjoys a powerful hold on the imagination of activists that is intensified, to different degrees, in all four countries by direct personal contacts. In ideological terms what matters in the United States is the anti-imperialist struggle of which the anti-war movement is an important, specific instance. While the war is a trigger for the anti-war movement, it is not central for the activists who decide to go further in challenging the state by violent means. Consistent with their anti-imperialist ideology they are not against the war but for the Vietcong. Similarly, Japanese radicals hold to a model of world-wide, simultaneous revolution. Removed from direct involvement in the war German and Italian radicals also fasten on anti-imperialism as a common frame for political action in societies that continue to view Communism as a serious source of danger. But in contrast to Italy the Vietnam war and the Third World matters greatly in Germany.

Beyond issues of ideology the international context is of great importance in shaping the history of clandestine groups. Because of the city's special legal status Berlin residents, for example, could not be drafted. Hence Berlin becomes an important center for underground radicals who seek to assist US GIs who are being shipped from Germany to Southeast Asia. German radicals also have significant direct contacts with the Third World, specifically with factions of the PLO in the Middle East. And more than a dozen make their exit from underground existence to newly assumed identities in the socialist GDR, with the assistance of the East German secret police. The Japanese Red Army moves abroad early on in its struggle, to find shelter and support in North Korea and in the Middle East. And at the height of the US New Left movement contact with international struggles -- attending international conferences, meeting with representatives from Third World socialist movements, being granted asylum in Cuba, Algiers or Mexico -- imbue a heightened sense of militancy and of belonging to a worldwide revolutionary movement. Although the material support which US radicals received was small compared to that of German, it diminished further in the 1980s as political connections to the Third World became even more conceptual and less concrete, with the significant exception of Cuba's continued support of Black and Puerto Rican political exiles. Violent groups thus were aided greatly in their political campaigns by states that opposed the rich industrial democracies in general and the United States in particular. Only the Italian groups appear to have had no more than marginal contacts with foreign sources of support.

In sum, international influences and contacts matter in all four cases. They are enhanced by the attenuation of Cold War tensions after the Cuban missile crisis. Although each society develops its own distinct sources for change, international detente offers new political opportunities which new social movements explore and on which more radical movement organizations build in subsequent years. The Vietnam war did not stop detente. The anti-war movement is important in the United States because the draft is the most important issue that mobilizes the young against the war. In Germany, Italy and Japan it is not the draft but a broader international language and contacts that gives left-wing groups an ideological space and a measure of foreign support or bases for supervised operations.

3. Common State Responses: Real and Manufactured Threats

The state's predisposition to margianalize left-wing groups engaging in political violence is strong in all four cases. It includes the ready criminalization of clandestine groups; high- profile political trials; severe conditions of detention and incarceration; emergency laws or police practices that permit a greater degree of cooperation with intelligence and special task forces, leading at times to covert, aggressive and at times illegal police activities; and heavy investment in police financial and technological resources. Ideology and instrumental reasons both point state policy in the same direction. It is in the self-interest of political leaders and police officials to defend themselves against the violence and threats that are targeted specifically on them. Furthermore, law and general political debate reinforce or create deep political divisions. While the sequencing by which interest and ideology interact differs from country to country, and in the different stages of processes of escalating and deescalating violent conflicts, in all cases both interest and ideology encourage state officials to margianalize dissent and suppress left-wing radical groups.

In all four cases we can witness in the 1960s and 1970s substantial movement towards a standardized, democratic policing model. As an ideal type this model includes the extension of law and policy to tactics that earlier had been ignored and unregulated; a more pragmatic view of the need for discretion in police decisions to either under- or overenforce order; a growing emphasis on preventive rather than reactive policing; the co-production of order with a concerned citizenry; greater reliance on science and technology for intelligence gathering and analysis; increasing attempts to create physical and social environments conducive to social control; and the creation of paramilitary police forces with the potential for an enhanced militarization of policing. In assessing the net effect of democratic policing on the increase or decrease of social control, that is, police protection or repression, we should distinguish between several aspects of policing: efforts to block illegal, violent actions; how these efforts are backed by democratic laws; differences in the laws according to process and substantive content; and the degree to which police adheres to the law in practice.

The repertoire of state action thus is broad. Intensive efforts at surveillance leads in some instances, for example the United States, to concerted attempts to infiltrate protest movements and clandestine groups so as to hasten their decline. It includes typically the attempt to split mass protest movements and underground militant groups. The hope is that such a split will isolate the latter from the former, initiate deescalation processes, and reintroduce the possibility of political debate among opponents. In such situations militant activists, however, tend to favor a further radicalization if they think that the government's policy encourages a preemptive depoliticization of contested policies.

States respond in a variety of ways to threats and violence. Indifference is not one of them. Although political perceptions and the centrality of states in the maintaining of social order vary, the four cases illustrate important commonalities. In all four countries government and the police responded initially in an ad hoc and improvised manner to the attacks of militant groups. Early on in the emergence of mass protest and the process of group formation, government elites and police officials tend, as in Germany and Japan, to frame the issue in terms of the weakness of state power. Quickly convinced of the inadequacy of that response they subsequently adopt the frame of "flexible" or "soft" policing" which is eventually institutionalized into the training practices and manuals of the police.

The content of flexible or soft policing varies somewhat in each of the four countries. In the case of the United States, for example, soft policing includes deception and surreptitious surveillance not found in Japan. But the United States police lacks the tactical flexibility that marks the Japanese police in its protracted conflict with popular mass protest movements. In all four countries flexible or soft policing tend to lower the exposure of group activities to media coverage and thus influences the escalation ladder of violence. Radicals intent on unmasking the state thus see in soft and flexible policing a particularly duplicitous move that militant violence must combat. And in all four countries there are limits to the strategy of flexible or soft policing. The criminal justice system in particular typically is extremely "hard" in its treatment of suspected and convicted left-wing militants. Flexible and soft policing and hard criminalization are two sides of the same coin.

States often encourage violence through the dogged pursuit of particular policies that create clandestine, violence-prone groups. The Vietnam War is a good example. Without the war the U.S. student movement would have taken a very different and less violent form. States can also deescalate violence through changing their policies. In the case of the United States, for example, after the Los Angeles Olympic Games of 1984, security measures were relaxed significantly. The amnesty policies that the Italian and German governments adopt in the 1980s and 1990s also contributed to a deescalation of violence.

But states do not merely respond to a reality defined as a series of challenges by radical groups. They also manufacture the threats they seeks to address. As the discussion of deterrence in national security has illustrated, the perception of threat can be as real as the "objective" threat "out there;" and perception is itself a political process that includes the manufacturing of the threat. This appears to be as true of internal as of external security affairs.

At times the manufacturing of threats serves the political needs of particular agencies in search of larger jurisdictions or budgets and of politicians in search of votes. Often, however, the creation of threats lacks such an obvious grounding in self-interested action. In the case of the United States, for example, counterintuitively, the threat posed by poor, black women in the 1980s elicited a stronger reaction from the state than that by middle-class, white men in the 1970s. Although in each of the four cases the interpretive frame that government and police officials give to acts of violence varies, in each case the state itself helps produce the threats to which it subsequently reacts. The abatement of the violence of left-libertarian groups in Italy, Germany and Japan, in the 1980s and 1990s thus helps shift some of the interpretive frames that had once been central to the definition of the "terrorist threat" to the threat posed by "organized crime".

Stigmatizing violence has the effect of drawing a clear boundary between law enforcement and militants. But violence is only one of several traits that, in the eyes of politicians and police officials, demarcates militants from the majority of society. Unconventional life style, Communist or socialist beliefs, opposition against the Vietnam war and, in the United States, race also are traits that make it easy to draw a clear line between "them" and "us".

The state's dual response to and manufacturing of threats and violence are reflected in legal developments. The legitimacy of the state depends, among others, on procedural matters, on the prevalence of rule-based over non-rule based forms of state control and the existence of quasi-public institutions that are empowered to review the applications of these procedures in concrete situations. In these four cases government policy at times suspended the rule of law within a continuously operating legal framework. The imposition of martial law or rule by emergency decree did not occur. This reluctance and the pervasiveness of soft and flexible methods of policing resulted, among others, from a global model of proper policing. It made it costly for governments to adopt extraordinary police measures which would have delegitimized the democratic character of these three post-fascist polities in international affairs. Firing on demonstrators, for example, was still an accepted tactic in Western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s when the police reacted to mass protest informed by the image of civil war. By the 1960s and 1970s such action had become totally unacceptable for the police in any democratic polity. International factors, furthermore, reinforced parallel domestic processes. National police forces learned relatively quickly from one another about the efficacy of soft policing. And they studied intently advances in computer-based technologies of surveillance.

Even though since 1945 these four states insist on the integrity of the rule of law, left-wing violence, at specific times, activates a very forceful response by state and police officials. The threshold is differently marked in each of the four cases. In Japan it is anti-Communism, national pride and protection of the emperor system; in Italy the fears and hatred of a class enemy; in Germany the specter of Weimar and an anti-Communism that is deeply implicated in the experience of national partition; and in the United States anti-Communism and fears of racial insurrection. In all cases passing this threshold often leads to a different manner in administrating existing laws or drafting new ones. Articles 129 and 129a of Germany's penal code, for example, outlaws the thinking of certain thoughts, very much in the spirit of Japan's pre-war Peace Preservation Law. Such restrictive legal provisions give state official much discretion and reduce the temptation they face to step outside of legal bounds. Here law helps in creating "terrorists" by establishing the grounds for suspicion and surveillance. Ironically, Germany's rigid application of such far-reaching legal rules covering mass protests overcrowded legal dockets and occasioned several amnesties. Law is not just a set of procedures for dealing with those who break rules. Sometimes it also helps create those whom it seeks to charge. Both processes are closely bound up with one another.

This is not to deny that laws often are used for instrumental reasons even in the breach. Italy is a case in point. Although the rule of law was not applied fully to Italy's Communist Left and the labor movement since 1945, it was not altogether surprising that its suspension occurred after workers had begun to join the student movement. On December 12, 1969 a bomb exploded in a bank in Milan. The secret police's involvement in planting that bomb signalled the commitment of those in power to defeat left-wing mass protest with all means, including illegal ones. Until 1974 Italy's secret police is in fact waging an "undeclared dirty war" against a protest movement which had brought students and workers together. Undercover agents not only collect information illegally but often seek to instigate and escalate violence.

Even before the formation of extremist left-wing, violence-prone groups, the Italian Parliament, after the mid-1960s, had passed a series of emergency laws which explicitly revoked the rule of law for suspected "terrorists". These laws reduced the conditions under which search warrants could be issued to the police, prolonged an already very long period of detention without trials, increased penalties for crimes committed with terrorist aims, excluded terrorists from only recently granted prisoner rights, and increased police power in crime prevention and investigation. With the support of the Communist Party the Italian state thus took aim at organized, armed, political attacks against democracy.

Although, in contrast, Japan experiences no significant changes in legislation, it does alter how existing laws are applied in three ways that: target nonparticipating organizers of mass demonstrations; permit bringing criminal charges against students removed from occupied buildings and holding them in custody while awaiting trial; and prosecute a few select student leaders with a rarely used Anti-Subversive Activities law that increases penalties when an individual is indicted on other criminal charges which the government sees as acts aiming at its overthrow. Taken together these three changes make it easy to redefine Japanese social movement activists as criminals.

Japan also changed some of its laws. The hastily passed University Control Law (August 1969) compels universities to stop lengthy on-campus conflicts either by negotiation or by calling in the police lest the Ministry of Education intervene directly in campus affairs. This law eliminates the campuses as staging areas for off-campus protests. Equally important is the repeated threat to invoke the Anti-Subversive Activities Law against organizations rather than individuals. This escalates surveillance and severely limits the organization's capacity to act even when the threat is not carried out. In the fall of 1968 the police greatly intensifies the surveillance and searches of designated activists and groups. While there is not much general ideological margianalization of broad concepts such as Communism or Marxism, by the early 1970s any association or expressed sympathy with the underground RAF is highly stigmatized. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s evidence of student activism, even without an arrest record, is frequently used to deny employment to otherwise qualified individuals, effectively margianalizing many college graduates for the rest of their lives. This sharp escalation in policing breaks the back of the mass movement. It also produces the environment for the emergence of an underground movement.

Once groups like Japan's Red Army Faction had begun operating, glaring legal gaps, for example on hijacking and the making of explosives, were quickly filled. But these legal changes were less consequential than those applied between 1968 and 1970 which redefined protest as criminal activity and labelled political activists as criminals. The state did not have to suspend the normal application laws or create new emergency laws to criminalize protest; it simply had to make a political decision to redefine the mass protests as a threat to the security of the state in order to invoke, or threaten to invoke, existing laws meant to deal with such possibilities.

Generally speaking the scale of violence in the US correlated with the intensity of the Vietnam war and the militancy of the anti-war movement. This summary assessment of American exceptionalism needs qualifications. Some estimates count as many as 2,800 bombings or attempted bombings between January 1969 and April 1970, a number which exceeds greatly the peak figures reported for Germany, Italy and Japan. The de-escalation of the war may have been the most important factor in the domestic de-escalation of violence. In the end it was not so much the democratic qualities of the United States but political and military defeat that ended the war, the anti-war movement and the first wave of domestic violence. To the extent that the war was caused by the abuse of democracy, the instigation of the war through the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and maintained through the executive intentionally misleading Congress and the public, we can establish an indirect link between democracy and non-violent protest.

In situations where the tradition of the rule of law is not as strong as in Germany, as was arguably true of Italy and Japan, it is relatively easy to make legal adjustments to new political exigencies. Similarly, in the United States anti-racketeering ordinances are applied indiscriminately against both right-wing and left-wing organizations in the 1980s. State officials chose occasionally to step outside the bounds of law. When subsequently these instances became publicly known it matters greatly how these transgressions are labelled politically: temporary aberrations or structurally pre-programmed.

4. Unintended Consequences of State-Society Interactions

The interaction between states and social movements set in motion dynamics of violence that were broadly similar in all four countries. Since it was not violence which triggered these processes but the prior decision to move underground, governments had a choice to focus attention only on the primary groups and to neglect the sympathizers from which they were drawn. Generally speaking governments and police officials chose differently. They initiated policies of hard policing that further radicalized fringes of broader protest movements and thus moved both protest and policing towards the use of violent means.

Although the specific relation between mass protest, group violence, and government policy is very difficult to disentangle, the interaction between state and society had a number of unintended consequences that enhanced both violence and repression. (1) Such measures tended to discourage moderate protest and radicalize segments of the protest movement through a heightened sense of unfair treatment, direct contact with the criminal justice system, and reduced possibilities to return to a normal social life. (2) Strong government measures against mass protests helped drive groups underground where they were harder to track and control. (3) Escalation tactics of militant groups tended to separate those who were willing to use more extreme tactics from the mass base of the broader protest movement. (4) Arresting the leaders of militant groups had the unintended consequence of creating space for less experienced and more radical leaders who were more likely to embark on more risky and violent courses of action. (5) Group violence aroused deep opposition in society to the actual results of the violence which created a climate receptive to the government taking even more repressive measures. (6) Groups operating underground diverted much of their attention away from political action to the task of surviving underground. (7) The government's intensive pursuit of underground activists helped produce secondary crimes related to underground survival, and it encouraged some of these groups to move abroad where their activities were even more difficult to monitor and control. (8) The move abroad by underground groups increased international cooperation of states and police forces with the express purpose of controlling the international activities of violence-prone groups.

We do not use the language of intended and unintended consequences in the attempt to uncover a tightly coupled action-reaction process. Rather, we see it as a heuristic helpful in locating similarities and divergences in the historical evolution of violence and repression in different country cases. A tightly coupled action-reaction model overemphasizes instrumental rationality and choice, and it glosses over the importance of historical accidents that emerges from the accounts of many participants who in their reconstructions have often pointed to the wide divergence between intended acts of political violence and actual outcomes. Relatedly, processes can be analyzed systematically, even though they may apply randomly to specific situations and individuals. In abstracting from concrete historical events to generalized processes it is easy to lose sight of the randomness with which processes that one may be able to decipher at a distance actually apply to individuals in concrete settings.

Stylized descriptions of processes must rely on categories and distinctions between objects, for example between movement, group and underground or between the official and the operative line of a group or government. But in reality such distinctions are fluid, partly overlapping, and shifting over time. The description of cross-national similarities and differences in the mobilization and escalation of group violence and the state's response do not produce consistent pairings. This may be the result of small numbers. Too limited a number of cases may not reveal possibly consistent underlying patterns of variations. Or it may result from an improper coding of the cases here discussed. But it is also be a useful reminder of the possible limits of all social science explanations in the face of complex historical processes.

5. Cross-National Differences in Social Mobilization, State Response and Collective Memories

So far the paper has emphasized primarily broad similarities in the experience that these four polities have had both in the violence of left-wing clandestine groups and in the response of government and the police. In this section we sketch summarily some of the main differences in both the intensity and duration of violent group actions and state responses.

State-Society Relations

Since beyond the material destruction of life and property group violence implicates also symbolic aspects of social life, its intensity is not easily measured cross-nationally. Based on the existing scholarship on these four countries, this paper argues, but does not seek to prove through statistical analysis, that the intensity of violent group action has been smaller in the United States than in Japan which in turn experienced less violence than did Italy and Germany. In terms of duration, the very sporadic outbreak of group violence in the United States in the early 1970s differs significantly from the decade-long experience of Italy during the 1970s and the even longer history of group violence experienced by Germany and Japan.

The intensity in the reaction of the government and the police also varied considerably across the four countries and in the state's reaction to mass movements and violent groups. The Italian state was toughest in its policing of mass protest as it frequently relied on undercover agents who followed the express purpose of fostering an escalation of group violence that could then justify a further escalation in police brutality. The Japanese police, by contrast, showed remarkable restraint in suffering heavy casualties as it confronted over many months large and threatening crowds of student demonstrators in the late 1960s; it sought to deescalate violence and controlled very strictly police brutality. The German and U.S. police fall between these extremes. The German police sought a selective response. Its policy aimed at integrating the majority of the movement and at criminalizing its fringe. As in Japan state repression originated from the judiciary rather than the police. In the United States the police followed a mixed strategy, deescalation and selectivity towards the student movement and provocation and escalation towards racially and ethnically based groups committed to violent action.

In the United States the Jeffersonian tradition offered an enabling myth that supported the concept of "power to the people", if not violent action, as an integral part of the democratic tradition. Similarly, in Japan mass movements and militant actions against overbearing state elites enjoyed a long-standing tradition and a social support unthinkable, for example, in the Germany of the 1960s. In both Japan and Germany only a generation after the end of fascism mass protest is seen as a serious threat to untested democratic institutions.

As is true of Germany, in the 1960s Italian society is deeply imbued by a strong sense of anti-Communism. But in Italy Communists do not pose an external threat but constitute a large, democratic party that represents the interests of the working class. When students and young workers join the party in large numbers after 1969, the party suddenly poses a serious threat to the stability of the regime. In contrast, in Germany the barbed wire that the East German communists built around their state negates their political impact in the West. Hence the German groups, lacking strong domestic roots, are building a global model for radical political action. In Italy and also in Japan Communist parties were legal. Hence anti-Communism was not a tool by which the government could easily rally civil society in its fight against left-wing violence.

The presence of a Parliamentary Left thus appears to matter. But in Germany the absence of a significant Parliamentary opposition between 1966-1969 lasted only three years and preceded rather than coincided with the period of violence. Hence no single set of structural conditions is plausibly linked to violence and repression in these four polities. The mere presence of militant political opposition in Italy and Japan which were opposed to the United States, for example, proved not to be decisive. For it fails to explain why violent groups did not form a decade earlier in these societies when anti-Americanism was arguably as strong. And it does not help us understand why the radical anti-American French Left did not move towards violent action in the 1960s. The Italian and Japanese party systems permitted the long-term domination by one party which blocked the avenues to power by a principled left-wing opposition. But France did not experience alternating governments either in the 1960s and 1970s yet did not have outbursts of violent social action in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally international detente moderated the divisions in Italy as the CP became more legitimate with the rise of Eurocommunism in the late 1970s; detente had no comparable effects in Japan.

Although they fail to offer systematic, parsimonious accounts across all four cases, differences in the relations between state and society advance our understanding across pairs of countries. A state that, like Germany, institutionalizes the rule of law and sees its core identity linked to law responds more severely to militant groups that challenge its primacy than a state that rests more on social than legal norms, as is true of Japan. A state structurally open to neo-fascist influences, as is Italy in the early 1970s, which permits the rule of law to break down, is likely to react more severely against left-wing violence than a state that is open to a variety of social interests, as is true of the United States. Analogously, a state that puts its security police forces and intelligence operation under civilian control, however much contested, as is true of the United States, will react less consistently than a state, like Japan, whose security police is de facto shielded from Parliamentary oversight.

When threatened by violence police officials tend to respond with violence. But the response varies across the four countries along lines that reflect the general violence-proneness of the four societies. The threshold for shooting is much lower for US than for Japanese police officials, with Italy and Germany falling somewhere between these two extremes. Here different thresholds reflect not differences in specific threats but the general social acceptance of police violence.

In all cases the police sought to raise the price for group militants. But the methods for doing so differed. In some cases the methods were more lenient than in others. How different states deal with imprisoned left-wing activists illustrates the point. Japan, for example, was more successful than the other three and, in particular, Germany in dealing with left-wing violence without ratcheting up government repression. While the police exploited the latitude that it had, the government never changed its policy. Japanese prison conditions are harsh. Solitary confinement considered "inhumane" in Germany is normal for unconvicted political prisoners in Japan. International attention singled out Germany rather than Japan in the 1970s. Solitary confinement means that in Japan, unlike in Germany, there is no recruitment in prisons for future cohorts of militants in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead in Japan there exists a solidaristic network that links prisoners to progressive lawyers who, in the 1990s, have succeeded among others in raising to international attention the issue of Japanese prison conditions as a possible violation of human rights.

In Germany, by contrast, as the government's policy became visibly more repressive during the 1970s radical lawyers became important public voices of the RAF and other radical groups. Often berated publicly by the RAF, the government, and the media several lawyers were arrested and convicted. Legal aid centers became a recruiting ground for future generation of radicals once the initial generation was behind bars. In Germany political trials and prisons were of great significance. German law acknowledges by 1976 that it is dealing with "political prisoners," a category that the United States throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and Italy until 1978, refuse to acknowledge.

The United States and Italy differ in their treatment of prisoners from Germany and Japan. In the United States the isolation unit built in the 1980s goes largely unnoticed because political prisoners were kept in the general prison system subsequently upgraded at a high economic cost. Eventually, a ruling by the Supreme Court stopped this practice as unconstitutional. In the early 1970s Italy jailed political activists for long periods thus creating a radical protest movement inside its prison system which is stopped only by the outbreak of wide-spread group violence in the mid-1970s. Trying to act as reformist go-between at first, until they become the target of attacks by the Red Brigades, defense attorneys leave the field to court-appointed lawyers.

Collective Memory

One factor that sets Italy, Japan and Germany with their more intense and protracted experience with left-wing violence apart from the United States is their 20th century experience with authoritarian or totalitarian political regimes and the absence of well-developed democratic institutions. But it is not the past but the way it is remembered which explains the different experience of Germany, Japan and Italy, compared to that of the United States with its long-standing democratic institutions and practices. But are historical trauma and historical amnesia specific categories of collective memory? And does the weight of memory vary across different levels of social movement politics and across different phases of the escalation processes that link group violence to state repression?

These questions point to the existence of significant differences among the four national cases. In Japan, for example, there existed no overt concern with a fascist legacy across virtually the entire post-war partisan spectrum of Japanese politics. What mattered to many student radicals, however, was the systematic suppression of the memories of the 1930s and 1940s by the establishment. Rediscovering that past was an act that connected them back to an older and submerged tradition of left-wing radicalism. The continuity of the emperor system and the problematic role the emperor had played in the 1930s and 1940s thus provided for many on the Japanese Left, and especially for many of the student radicals later drawn to violence, a powerful connection with the past that helped inform their opposition to corporate capitalism and the LDP regime and its policies in the late 1960s. The officially sanctioned and propagated collective memory of Japan as a victimized country in the Pacific War accounted for little. Lack of trust in state institutions and political leaders who wielded power with great arrogance counted a lot. Even though there were no critical history textbooks, this view of history was conveyed to Japanese high-school students by radical history teachers, organized in a powerful union, whose views in the classroom the government had no way of countering. In contrast, in Italy with its strong, anti-fascist, left-wing tradition collective memory was not a reminder of the consequences of the absence of active resistance against perceived repression, as in Japan, but of its rightfulness.

Germany's collective memory focused on the political discontinuity and the lessons drawn from the Weimar Republic that provided the source of conflict between left-wing radicals and the state. The Left interpreted as semi-fascist the judicial and political doctrine of the Bonn Republic as a "fighting democracy" (streitbare Demokratie), of a polity that, unlike Weimar, was determined to combat the ideological enemies of democracy. Both left-wing activists and the government framed the perception of the present in terms of the past. Each side accused the other of being the present incarnation of the country's Nazi past. For the government left-wing radicals were a new SA undermining the Weimar Republic. For the activists, the West German government was quasi-fascist, as evidenced in its support of a genocidal war in Southeast Asia, its occasionally violent repression of public dissent, and its harsh treatment of imprisoned activists. Germany's collective memory thus intensified the escalation of processes linking violence and repression.

Similarly in the eyes of the Italian protesters the bourgeois state was always ready to betray democratic principles in order to defend the powerful and the rich. The massacre of the Piazza Fontana, and the police cover that the alleged perpetrators received, helped coin the phrase of a "state of massacres." Similarly, inhumane conditions of incarceration and the deaths of the prisoners in the Stammheim prison, in the eyes of the convinced, merely proved the murderous consequences of a new kind of authoritarianism.

In contrast to the brief flirtation of the middle-class whites who moved from the anti-war movement into the underground, collective memory played a large role among Black and Puerto Rican radicals. These memories were focused less on the historic injustices of the US state and more on old nationalist and separatist responses that had existed throughout the 20th century. The FALN, for example, located its origin not in the community struggles of the 1960s or in the New Left but rather in a tradition of nationalist revolts which took place on the island of Puerto Rico in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1950s. These militants thus saw themselves as progenies of a longstanding tradition.

6. Are there Lessons for the New Right?

Since the late 1980s left-wing violence no longer captures the headlines. In the US these groups had, in any case, fought a battle largely shielded from public scrutiny. Italy devised in 1983 an exit option for convicted left-wing radicals that was successful in reintegrating most of them into civil society. Germany followed suit in the late 1980s and 1990s. And through patient policing and sheer luck the Japanese police managed to arrest a substantial number of those still at large outside the country. Instead right-wing violence now makes headlines: the militia movement and the bombing of Oklahoma in the United States, the skinheads and the burning of hostels for foreigners in Germany, neofascists in Italy, and organized crime and Aum in Japan.

The weakening of left-wing radicalism and the recent prominence of right-wing groups probably has been helped by the end of the Cold War which removed some of the stigma under which the Right had existed, for example in Italy and Germany. After 1991 everywhere the perception spread quickly that the state was no longer seriously threatened by Communism from abroad. Furthermore the extreme fringes of the New Right may have drawn vitality from the growing influence of the Right in the political systems, for example, of the United States and Italy, as well as other European states. Is a focus on dynamic processes from social movements to clandestine groups and on the interaction between state and society helpful for the analysis of the violent actions of such right-wing groups? Since we know far too little, our answer to this question is tentative, and it differs from case to case. We provide here some tentative thoughts on salient similarities or differences.

Right-wing violence may be a response of social sectors to rapid change. The right-wing backlash that the freedom marches and the civil rights movement created in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, may have repeated itself in the 1980s and 1990s in reaction to a far-reaching process of economic restructuring. But it is problematic to speak of "the" new Right in the United States. There are many Rights. The Order, modelled after Nazi icons, the militia movement, and the pro-life movement all rely to some extent on violent acts. With the exception of the pro-life movement violence is a form of public demonstration rather than an emergency action.

Radicals from both extremes share a great sense of urgency prompting them to take extreme measures. While violence was in the case of the New Left the last stage of a gradual process of mobilization and escalation, in the case of the new Right the newly committed appear to be the vanguard of violence. In its political tactics the U.S. anti-abortion movement has been indebted to the New Left. And just as left-wing violence was an extreme manifestation of a more general social movement, some parts of right-wing violence, for example the militias, could be viewed as an exaggerated demonization the of anti-statism of Ronald Reagan's presidency. And the connections of the new Right to deep political currents in US history are strong. The United States has both an ideological strand of radical libertarianism that reacts strongly against the coercive powers of the state and a radical communitarianism favoring tightly knit, homogeneous communities. Hence the New Right may not be analyzed adequately by looking for the splintering of some fringe groups into clandestinity from a general protest movement. Instead it may be more promising to look at extreme forms of individual political activism rather than at organized group activities.

Generally speaking, on both extremes of the political spectrum in Europe and Japan political violence is a tool of groups with distinctive ideological roots. In Japan, for example, there are consistent ideological outlooks and repertoires for action that differentiate Right from Left. The right favors individual not collective action and violence with a symbolic and expressive dimension rather than concrete organizational intent. And right-wing groups are held together by ideological rather than organizational links. The most significant right-wing violence of the 1990s, the Aum gas attacks, were carried out by an organization that had its roots in a long-standing right-wing tradition of planning coup d'etats.

But as in Germany, Aum also shows that there are some new elements on the Japanese Right. Aum was not merely aiming at correcting the course of the state. Driven by millenarian inspirations it wanted to destroy the state. Aum preferred technological over military power and weapons for mass destruction over weapons for individual killings. When its laboratory facilities were uncovered in March 1995 Aum had not only stockpiled enough chemicals to manufacture six tons of nerve gas but had also begun to produce and experiment with biological weapons, and was planning to import the deadly Ebola virus into Japan. Furthermore, beyond Japan's political bureaucratic elites Aum targeted the centers of Japan's industrial power.

In Germany, the New Right raises new and vexing questions. The Right is, for example, a remarkably unorganized social movement rather than a set of tightly organized and distinctive groups. Transposed into the United States, Germany's New Right groups approximate gangs. And while there is quite a bit of public discussion about the degree of quiet support that the New Right enjoys among its sympathizers, the lack of organization and the diffuseness of support have made it very difficult, if not impossible, for the police to infiltrate the New Right and to combat the violent acts, especially against foreigners, that it carries out. Lack of organization also leaves neo-Nazi parties on the far-right of the party system frustrated by their inability to exploit the New Right's electoral potential.

In Italy cycles of violence linking New Left and New Right have been strong since the early 1970s. Violence was not the sole prerogative of the Left but was in fact initiated by a rightist group. When the radical Right lost the support of the Italian state after 1976 it began to imitate quite directly the violent acts committed by the Left.

The meaning of right-wing and left-wing violence may differ. The US is a much more violent society than Japan, Germany or Italy. But until the Oklahoma bombing that violence was not considered "abnormal." To cite a second example, in all four societies at the time left-wing violence was understood as "terrorist" even when it targeted not state institutions and office holders but prominent members of the business community. In the 1990s the arson attacks of skinheads and youth gangs are not so understood even when they lead to serious international tension. Some violent acts are widely considered to be fundamentally subversive or abnormal; others as merely dangerous and regrettable. Right-wing violence will be less threatening to police and government officials than left-wing violence. This may make possible a policy of benign neglect that, if pursued in the 1970s and 1980s, might well have dampened the cycle of left-wing violence by restricting police attention only to the direct offenders not to the circle of sympathizers whom the police criminalized and radicalized, thus perpetuating violence far beyond its point of origin. Democratic states are supposed to be even-handed in the application of the law to those who challenge the authority of the state through violence. The policies that governments and police are adopting against right-wing violence offer an opportunity to test this assumption.

Although we know far too little, the tendencies to combat Right violence in the 1990s like Left violence in the 1970s, is disquieting. Flexible policing and criminalization are easy, particularly since, with the experience of the last 30 years, they have now been institutionalized in police practices. In addition there exists an ideological dimensions in the response to left-wing violence. In all four cases, and in particular in Germany, there was a clear recognition that left-wing violence could not be defeated through police or judicial means alone. Rather radical critics of industrial democracy had to be won back by being convinced of the integrity of German democracy and the existence of opportunities for meaningful political participation. Besides police and judicial action political debates in the public sphere also mattered. At some times the debate was crude and may have only reflected or possibly intensified violence and repression; at other times, however, it was well-intentioned and dignified and may have helped the cause of deescalation and peace.

Political reengagement and public discourse with violence-prone groups on the extreme Right raises difficult issues. Where, for example, should one draw the border between lending credence and legitimacy to these groups by offering them a public forum on the one hand and seeking to reengage them politically so that they do not move underground and start campaigns of violence? If there is a lesson from the past it is the need to avoid viewing right-wing radicals just as lunatics coming from a political nowhere and destabilizing legitimate polities. The New Right in each of these countries has its distinctive social milieu and internal splits. Its politics may look andiluvian to some and postmodern to others. But since in the past the record of flexible policing and criminalization in each of the four countries has, at best, had a mixed success, we need to confront difficult questions about the conditions under which we should welcome the initiation of public dialogue with right-wing groups in the hope of convincing them of the absolute necessity to avoid clandestinity and to seek democratic dialogue instead. If the experience with left-wing radicals during the past three decades is any guide, this will be a daunting political task.