ALFRED MARQUART been solved or stop working when discouragement about resistance to their activities sets in. These short-term groups, as sociologists call them, probably constitute the majority of citizen's action groups; they may fight the construction of a highway close to their homes or for the creation of a child-care center, or come together in support of a political party at election time. Most often, they oppose decisions made by local governement, a city council, or even the federal governement. Thus they struggle against decisions made high above their heads which threaten their existece directly. "Almost everyone considers insufficient child-care, oversize classrooms, environmentally destructive housing projects. and an atmosphere poisoned by industrial plants as problems. It became increasingly necessary not only for political groups, but for the individual citizen himself, to do something about them. People from all social backgrounds and from all political camps seem, at least on the surface, to feel concerned and ready to express this concern in a critical and constructive way ."(3) While numerous citizen's action groups deal primarily with local and regional issues, a large number of broader-based groups also exists. These struggle against the construction of atomic power plants and the threat to life that they represent, against pollution caused by airports, or for the victory of a political party, for example the Social Democrats' Voter Initiative, whose most prominent activist is the writer Giinther Grass. They fight against paragraph 218, which makes abortion a crime in West Germany. These and more make up the broad spectrum of citizen's action groups, along with the radical right wing German Citizen's Action Group. * * * In a wider sense of the term, citizen's action groups certainly existed in the past. In ancient Greece, citizens formed groups in order to support their election candidates, and the workers' organizations of the 19th century can also be compared to them, as can Henry Dunant's founding of the International Red Cross. (3) P.C. Mayer-Tasch, Die Biirgerinitiativenbewegung, p. 11. 62
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