ABSTRACT
Parliamentary opposition has been called the ‘stepchild’ of political research. 1 By comparison, extra-parliamentary opposition has suffered near neglect. The attention it did receive has tended to grind an axe and oscillate between rejection and adulation. 2 Extra-parliamentary politics were branded as a danger to the stability of parliamentary democracy; 3 or they were hailed as the one dynamic component in an ossified party system, a badly needed corrective of parliamentary and party-based practices. 4 The peace movement as the largest of the new political movements in the 1980s attracted both evaluations. One side expected a new orientation of defence policies and defence alliances and the other feared a collapse of the security consensus and the military bulwark against the East. 5
