6 - Patterns of radicalization in political activism

Summary

The preceding descriptions of the macro- and meso-conditions for (and characteristics of) the development of political violence in Italy and Germany at the end of the sixties and during the seventies can take us part of the way toward understanding political violence. But now we must take a further step and examine the phenomenon from another perspective: the micro-level. On the one hand, how did the activists perceive the external political conditions for protest and the evolution of movement organizations? And on the other, how did environmental characteristics and organizational processes affect the lives of the activists? Why did some of these activists radicalize their politics, sometimes – more often in Italy than in Germany – to the point of going underground?

In asking these questions, I make two assumptions. First: the effects of the interactions between the state and the movements are mediated by the militants' perception of the reality in which their political involvement developed. The main tool for determining the link between individual motivations, at the microlevel, and environmental conditions, at the macro-level, is the analysis of the activists' perceptions and of the small-group dynamics that intensified and radicalized their involvement. I do not wish to imply that by taking the activists' perceptions into account, I also took everything they said or wrote at face value. But their “memoires” do give us a means of relating the macro- and meso-conditions described in the previous chapters to the individual activists' choices.