Green Parties and Political Change in Contemporary Europe

New Politics, Old Predicaments

Michael O'Neill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138314450
• eBook ISBN: 9780429828829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Published in 1997, This book offers an up-to-date guide to the Green parties of Western Europe as the optimism of the 1980s confronts the 'Green fatigue' of the 1990s. The approach is both thematic and comparative. Green politics in Europe is located in its historical and cultural context. There is a comparative analysis of the principal ideological questions, policy issues and strategic dilemmas that have confronted the European Greens. There are national profiles of Green politics throughout the European Union. The conclusion addresses the critical issue of political change in post industrial societies. It discusses the contribution of Green parties to the 'New Politics' and assesses their likely impact on post-modern politics

Part One: The Green phenomenon: roots and branches

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street”

William Blake, Notebooks

1

The dynamics of Green party politics in contemporary western Europe

1. The rise of Europe’s Green parties: mixed legacies and radical origins

The ecological movement in western Europe is undoubtedly a child of the cumulative postindustrial crisis which has settled on the continent over recent decades. This ‘crisis’ followed on from the political impact and economic repercussions of the oil price shocks of the seventies which disturbed the political landscape. The emergence of Green parties mirrored the growing disquiet within the political establishment itself and, beyond that, of publics increasingly concerned with both the negative consequences of three postwar decades of continuous economic growth, followed by the more recent threat of economic recession. The Club of Rome Report of 1972 - “The Limits to Growth”¹ - captured this newfound ambivalence about materialism. The Report’s expression of unease marked a watershed. It questioned past nostrums of exponential growth and rejected the complacency associated with them This concern was reinforced by a growing distaste in some quarters - on the political left and among the young particularly - with the West’s increasing strategic reliance on nuclear weapons. A parallel concern was with the growing dependence on nuclear energy for peaceful industrial purposes.

These multiple anxieties fed into an initially inchoate radical protest movement throughout Europe. Originally rooted in localised and small-scale citizen action groups, these movements adopted various forms of direct action or protest. These included demonstrations, 'sit-ins', propaganda campaigns and lobbying the established 'system' parties.² Even in the early stages, and confronted by an unsympathetic and occasionally hostile response from the authorities, most of these 'alternative' movements emphasised their sense of political responsibility by discounting violence or ritualistic confrontation with authority for its own sake. Indeed, many of these movement activists - far from being anomic 'outsiders', social outcasts, misfits or otherwise marginalised individuals drawn from the social fringes - were more often than not well adjusted and, measured in terms of social or educational status, conventionally located members of society.³ For the most part they were motivated neither by envy, malice or bitterness; nor were they committed to subverting the political order. Those activists who took up the case of ecologism emphasised their positive commitment to society. They were concerned above all to 'save' society from, as they saw it, an impending and serious ecological threat - an 'eco-disaster' waiting to happen.

This is not to suggest that the 'new politics' in any of its expressions is merely a factional off-shoot of established leftist politics. Or that ecologism is another, albeit more politically focused, expression of conventional middle class romanticism, channelled into fashionable or progressive issues such as nature conservancy or the defence of public health. On this first point, these new movements - whilst finding clear affinities with the issue agenda of the orthodox libertarian left - remained deeply disenchanted with what they regarded, by and large, as the 'old' left's complicity in and contribution to, the fundamental economic errors of industrialism⁴ The evidence on this count seemed damning. Socialist governments throughout western Europe had long been led by their redistributive agenda and unquestioning commitment to the industrialism paradigm to endorse the materialist culture of unlimited growth. More recently, during what the new left saw as the twin nuclear 'crises' of the early seventies, the orthodox left had even served in some of those governments which had taken 'heretical' decisions; both to install nuclear energy technology and to accommodate American strategic weapons.⁵ Moreover, the problem seemed a systemic rather than merely a contingent one. European social democracy's close affiliation with the patron-client politics which sustains modem corporatism apparently precluded any fundamental revision of their policy priorities.⁶ Of particular note here was the old left's enthusiastic commitment to the strategy of industrial expansion and economic growth, which had formed a central plank of its policy platform throughout this century.

Although the exigencies of politics have obliged radical ecologism to 'flirt' with social democracy within Europe's various national polities, there remains nevertheless a distinct ideological gulf between them. This clear rift of purpose and perception was further widened by abiding differences of political style and organisation. As far as social democrats were concerned, the new radicalism was both utopian and adventurist. Whereas the new ecologists, for their part perceived the old left as anti-libertarian, unimaginative, rigidly hierarchical, corruptible and authoritarian. In short, they dismissed it as an atrophied movement which discounted internal democracy and political self expression. Indeed, the conventional left seemed to its radical critics to be little more than a mirror image of the political establishment which had co-opted it and then distorted socialism's earlier progressivism. In direct contrast, the ecological movement shunned the velvet embrace of political conformity. It perceived itself to be an expression of an entirely new and radical politics. Within their own particular issue area, ecologists saw themselves as confronting the tacit environmentalism of the moderate conservation lobby.⁷ The contrast here between ecologism and nature conservancy and its adjacent causes was more than one of emphasis.⁸ What began to emerge out of the renaissance of Green political thought in the sixties was a wholly new cosmological paradigm - a Weltanschauung in which technology, science, philosophy, ethics and politics were synthesised with the imperative to take political action in pursuit of 'real' change.⁹ As one commentator has defined the radical thrust of the emergent Green movement: “Neither conservationist nor environmentalists believe that the Good Life is much different from the one we presently lead, but political ecologists most certainly do. It is in this sense that ecologism can properly take its place alongside other political ideologies.... Ecologism cannot be seen as simply embedded in other political ideologies, it is a political ideology in its own right”.¹⁰

It was but a small step from such a damning critique of the status quo to launching an outright political challenge against establishment politics on its own ground, at the ballot box.¹¹ This challenge was, of course, an uneven one. The momentum for a Green party politics was fitful and dependent on local issues and other contingencies. Nevertheless, by the 1970s, a Green agenda was discernible across the western European political landscape. Green politics eventually took root at both the local and national levels and, subsequently, in the transnational arena of the European Parliament itself. One of the new movements' more insistent voices underscores the significance of this rebuttal of the old politics of confusion, duplicity and compromise, by recommending a wholly different agenda to that of the industrial polity; inasmuch as “the most radical (Green aim) seeks nothing less than a non violent revolution to overthrow our whole polluting, plundering and materialistic industrial society and, in its place, to create a new economic and social order which will allow human beings to live in harmony with the planet. In these terms, the Green Movement lays claim to being the most radical and important cultural force since the birth of socialism”.¹²

The moral energy and political commitment which fuelled this critique was drawn disproportionately from the younger,¹³ better educated¹⁴ and more articulate strata of postwar European society. As a movement ecologism received its greatest political impetus from the disruptive aftermath of the major oil crisis of 1973-74. The “oil shock' was a momentous event in postwar history. It can lay claim to many important legacies. Amongst its ramifications this catharsis helped to sustain the West's nuclear energy programme. It also raised up the issue agenda of even the conventional political parties concern about resource scarcity and material priorities. And by extension it presented the new radicalism with a major political opportunity. Likewise, the emergent Greens acquired further political momentum from NATO's dual track decision on its intermediate nuclear forces - followed in the early 1980's by the siting of Cruise and Pershing 2 missiles on European soil.¹⁵ What had so far been localised and politically ineffectual factions, more concerned with 'parish' issues or giving vent to a disparate moral outrage, began to coalesce, albeit with variable success and speed, into a more cogent political movement on the ground.¹⁶ They did so by regrouping under national and eventually European 'umbrella' Green party groups. No-one should underestimate here - and not least in movements that made a political virtue of libertarianism - the sheer variety of organisational patterns and policy priorities in the fabric of this new political ecologism. This was by no means the formula politics of the altogether more centralised and oligarchic 'catchall' parties cast in the conventional mould. Nevertheless, the very imperatives of political organisation, and especially the dilemmas facing radical parties seeking in some way to locate themselves within the conventional political game, did tend to focus the internal debate within these new parties on some broadly comparable themes. In the course of their development divisions, both tactical and strategic, ensued. These conflicts were sharpened, as they always are in parties wedded to a pristine notion of ideology, by fundamentalist tendencies. Two of the critical fault lines which have given Green party politics its particular cachet occurred over the nature of political organisation per se - the anti-party debate - and indeed, over the elemental purpose of political activity itself - whether or to what extent ecologism represented a wholly novel agenda; or whether it was merely a radical accommodation with the established left. These debates certainly debilitated some of these movements. At the same time, they increased their political profile, if not always their electoral purchase. By the end of the seventies, the Greens could at least no longer be discounted as an entirely peripheral movement on Europe's political landscape.

2. The 'new politics': a model of institutionalised protest

Radical political movements operating on the margins of established polities and challenging their stewardship as resource managers and their legitimacy as guardians of the public interest are by no means a new phenomenon of western European politics. Anti-system - as opposed to extremist anti-regime - movements have been a permanent feature of the oppositional landscape of modern European politics. There are, however, distinct analytical and empirical differences between these earlier expressions of protest movement, and the current mode of 'alternative' politics. All forms of social movement radicalism are, by definition, primarily oppositional. Yet their intrinsic differences have encouraged students of comparative radicalism to treat them as entirely distinct entities. English Chartism, the food riots which accompanied the earliest phases of European industrialisation¹⁷ or, indeed, the student protest movement of the nineteen sixties, remain quite distinct from the current phenomenon.¹⁸ What distinguishes these earlier movements from the new social movements is their fluid and ephemeral nature. These protests were often reactive and occasionally the irrational expressions of marginalised or otherwise exploited social groups. They resonate with the sheer political frustration of Victims' unable to control or influence those macro socioeconomic changes or cyclical shifts of circumstance which periodically overwhelm the 'wretched of the earth'.¹⁹ While the contemporary student movement in the sixties did reflect an ephemeral element in the social structure, given the relatively brief duration of the higher education process, it gave rise to more durable radicalisms, which were hardly marginalised in either the sociological or social psychological sense of that term. The new radicalism was also different in many other respects from the reactive mass movements which had littered Europe's historical landscape. Indeed, the student movement provides a useful analytical demarcation between what are clearly different social formations. To that extent it marked a clear boundary between the old and new politics of protest.²⁰ In so far as the subsequent Green movement drew on that source, for both personnel and ideas, it follows, too, that any caricature of ecologism as a merely romantic reaction to the imperatives of progress and socio-economic change is misplaced. While there are discernible elements of utopianism apparent on the broad ecological canvas, to misrepresent the Green movement as little more than a retrogressive or instinctive backlash against progress is to misunderstand both its relevance and unique contribution, both to contemporary political discourse and political organisation.

To make this particular claim is not to say that the new radical politics was merely a reprise of the successful translation, over the past century or so, of organised social protest and organised labour into effective modern mass parties. To take but one example of successful political inclusivism, the various European labour movements impinged on, and eventually acquired political space in, the continent's existing quasi-democratic regimes, precisely on the basis of their pre-existing industrial strength and organisation. In spite of deep ideological schisms and factional disputes within these broad movements, Europe's social democratic parties were, for the most part, soon reconciled to the parliamentary route, unfazed by the purpose of winning political power, and committed, whatever maverick dissidents might have suggested to the contrary, to using this political resource as the primary instrument for effecting socio-economic change. Europe's modern radical movements were, by no stretch of the imagination, even a pale shadow of these historical forerunners. On the one hand, student radicalism in Europe and elsewhere fitted the classical mold of a collective but essentially amorphous anti-system movement. To this extent, it coalesced a broad spectrum of leftist or libertarian tendencies.²¹ These were little more than 'groupuscles' expressing a vague and selective neo-Marxian rhetoric; and rooted socially and somewhat uncertainly in a declasse and shifting clientele of youthful elements, passing briefly through higher education.²² This historically distinct form of protest was, in part, a classic instance of those periodic shifts in social expectation, which frequently occur between successive generations.²³ Such generational 'shifts' invariably have a political impact. They have accounted for many similar, if ill organised, political expressions of socio-economic disorientation. Such a 'zeitgeist' might be detected in, for instance, the shift to political militancy in many European democracies in the aftermath of the Great War, or in the enhanced popularity of collectivist or Keynesian 'solutions' to social welfare problems after 1945. The student challenge to the conventional morality of 'bourgeois' society throughout the 1960s was, likewise, an expression of distaste and even contempt for a 'failed' past; one that was expressed - indeed ostentatiously exhibited - in a lively if fluid counter-culture.²⁴

This particular phenomenon was, however, more than a generational spasm or a mere iconoclastic protest. A longitudinal study by Whalen and Flacks²⁵ rejected the complacent view of the political establishment - either that these youthful rebels were only temporarily marginalized or that the lure of affluence and the responsibilities of careerism would soon reintegrate them into conventional society. The new left deposited instead alternative layers of meaning and ideas which laid the foundations, however irregularly, of a new radical politics that bore intermittent fruit thereafter. Over time, what began as an unstructured and reactive movement acquired its own gravitas as utopianism was replaced by expressions of radical realism.²⁶ The attempts of its enthusiasts, however spasmodic or spontaneous, to challenge what they saw as the structural and policy shortcomings of the contemporary social order, foreshadowed the elaborate critique enshrined in the 'new politics' which followed on from it.²⁷ The 'rationality' of this critique, with its awareness of the important linkage between political means and ends, was an important and discernible quality. This basic strategic sense, however naive or limited its content in some instances, demarcated these new radical movements from their merely reactive or spontaneous predecessors. Klaus Eder has appropriately identified this special characteristic as a form of collective learning. Collective learning does not depend on the mediation of ideas through centralised party machines with their elites, caucuses and oligarchies....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: The Green phenomenon: roots and branches
• Part Two: Green parties and Europe’s changing political order
• Part Three: New politics and Green parties: the problematic of political change
• References
• Index