Environmental Action in Eastern Europe

Responses to Crisis

Barbara Jancar-Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781563240362
• eBook ISBN: 9781315486918
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The environmental crisis in Eastern Europe - air and water pollution, toxic waste dumps, and unsafe nuclear facilities - has been vividly documented since the revolution of 1989. Not only did the communist states have an abysmal record of environmental destruction, but the issue of environmental protection and safety proved to be one of the msot powerful catalysts of unified opposition to these regimes. This collection of essays by both Western and East European experts examines the efforts to develop strategies for dealing with the crisis, both by governments and at the grassroots level of newly emerging Green movements. Among the countries represented here are Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Slovenia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

1
Introduction

Barbara Jancar-Webster

In 1989 the people of Eastern Europe threw off the communist yoke, and with it, forty years of Soviet hegemony. The principal issue that became symbolic of the arbitrary and dictatorial nature of the communist system was the environment. In every East European country and in republics of the Soviet Union the population rallied to demand the end of the regime which had brought them to the brink of environmental catastrophe. The elections of 1990 brought to power parties that promised swift environmental remediation; yet to date, no government has given more than lip service to environmental projects. The environmental issue receded into the background as old nationalist scores demanded settlement and new economic concerns pushed to the forefront. At the beginning of 1992, the former communist countries found themselves deep in the process of transition. It was clear where they had come from; but the future was shrouded in uncertainty. Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union faded from the map, to be replaced by sovereign states formed from the constituent republics of the communist federations. There was much talk of democracy and human rights, but in most countries these were far from being implemented. The toll from the war between Croatia and Serbia was estimated at $15 billion, with over half a million people driven from their homes and some 15,000 killed.¹ In Nagorno-Karabakh, battles raged between Azeri and Armenian nationalists. In Czecho-Slovakia, the government instituted a five-year moratorium on the employment of former members of the Communist Party, and then negotiated its own demise as the country broke in two. Much was written about the need to create a free market economy, but in every country in the region, the bulk of economic activity remained in state hands.

This book was developed from papers presented at the World Slavic Congress held at Harrogate, England, in July 1990. At that time, there was general euphoria regarding developments in Eastern Europe. In June of that year, Czechs and Slovaks had gone to the polls in the first free elections since 1946. The Civic Forum and its Slovak counterpart won handily. Throughout the region that summer, the air was electric with change, reform, and new beginnings. The papers presented at the Congress reflected the positive atmosphere. But like all new beginnings, it takes time for seeds to bear fruit, and the first flowers can appear a long way off. The papers presented here mirror the uncertainties and doubts that accompanied the end of the democratic honeymoon and present a sober assessment of the chances for ameliorating the region's serious environmental problems any time soon.

The chapters that follow address the current uneasy time of transition in a similar pattern. Each attempts to explain why and how the old regime brought such environmental destruction, why and how the opposition utilized the environmental theme to bring down the communist government, and what new legislation and organized action on the part of environmental groups are needed to remedy the existing negative environmental conditions.

These problems are arranged under two separate categories and treated on a country-by-country basis: legislation or environmental remediation from the top down, and the environmental movement, or environmental remediation from below. The authors are specialists in the area or government officials from the East European countries, Russia, and the West. The mix of authors was deliberate. While the Western experts base their analyses on observations from outside the system, the East European and Russian specialists write from their life experiences within. The tone and seriousness of the chapters vary widely from the ironic humor of Sandor Peter of Hungary and Evgenii Shvarts of Russia to the drier scholarly prose of Michael Kozeltsev of Moscow University and Evaldas Vebra of Lithuania's Department of Environmental Conservation.

There may be objections that not all the countries of the region are represented here. Attempts to secure the participation of Bulgarian and Romanian experts were frustrated by difficulties in communication. Nevertheless, the problems discussed in this collection of essays may be considered representative of those faced by all the new democratic governments in developing effective environmental programs.

Several common themes ran through all the chapters. First and foremost, while admitting the validity of the more general categories of problems causing environmental deterioration, such as inefficient use of energy, old plant equipment, forced use of coal for fuel, and poor enforcement of environmental regulations, all the authors insist that environmental degradation must be seen as endemic to the communist system qua system. The East European experts are virtually unanimous in the opinion that the command method of rule, or what East Europeans commonly call "real socialism," was the root cause of the environmental problems of their country. Szacki, Głowacka, Liro, and Szulczewska baldly state: "The ecological crisis in Poland and other countries coming out of 'real socialism' is the result of a disastrous doctrine of economic development implemented over the past 45 years." According to Peter, "The system of state socialism and its philosophical basis, the communist ideology, are factors of pollution themselves." Seserko talks of the "economic monopolies" in Slovenia, lulled into comfort under communist rule and practicing "barbarism" on the environment. According to Kozeltsev, "Marx and Lenin paid very little attention to environmental issues.... The protection of nature ... was treated in the classic way, simply as a factor increasing productivity."

The Westerners share similar views, although expressed in somewhat different language. Fisher identifies the key features of the communist system as the exclusion of society from the decision-making process and the restriction of information flows. Censorship permitted the creation of what he terms a façade of order over a reality of disorder, which increasingly appeared in its environmental form. Kabala describes the system as one based on "the extensive pattern of development," which saw the creation of heavy industry and the achievement of import substitution as the road to socialism.

A second general finding is that the power of the environmental movement during the downfall of the system was more symbolic than real. First of all, the official mass organizations, particularly in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, had engaged large segments of the population in solid conservation efforts, and in the case of Czechoslovakia were increasingly taking on the role of environmental conscience, particularly in Slovakia. Second, in every country, by the mid-1970s, a core of environmental scientists had emerged with access to environmental data who were working within the system to put the environment on the political agenda. Finally, the unofficial environmental groups that proliferated after the Chernobyl disaster did not receive mass support until after other opposition groups had joined them and the environmental problem had been transformed into a political issue. Persanyi, among others, notes the existence of a great many unofficial environmental groups in the 1980s. Only one of these, the Danube Circle, received massive popular support, and only after the conflict over the construction of the Danube dams was transformed into an open political fight between the old regime and the opposition. Szacki notes the tactical role of the environment in the roundtable talks that led to the first relatively free elections in 1989, pointing out that the environmental talks were broken off by the opposition, not the government. Shvarts gives us a feeling of the public's perception of the political nature of the Soviet student environmental movement during the 1970s: "When every tenth poacher was a party, Soviet, or Komsomol official,... the work of the student groups was regarded as the embodiment of people's democracy, as the realization of societal control over the party and state aristocracy...."

The symbolic role of the environmental groups as defenders of democracy was the principal reason in the minds of virtually all the authors for the movement's rapid loss of power and fall from public view. All the authors express disappointment with the new governments' prosecution of environmental problems. Election rhetoric notwithstanding, no government has yet undertaken any serious remedial environmental program. Several reasons are offered for the lack of government action: the priority of the economy, the need for stability to preserve democracy, the government's ignorance concerning the importance of a healthy environment for economic growth, the population's lack of awareness of environmental problems, the complexity of environmental issues.

Finally, both East Europeans and Westerners stress the importance of Western assistance in three critical areas: intergovernmental assistance, foreign financial aid, and help from the international environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Fisher pays particular attention to the role of the international NGOs in providing the stable organizational structure and financial base upon which NGOs in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union can build. Both sides apparently concur in the view that Western know-how, institutions, and money are the appropriate successors to the old Stalinist organizational and financial instruments. Only Seserko seems to reserve opinion on this matter. He chastises the big-business interests of Austria, Italy, and Germany on their eagerness to profit from the building of what he believes to be unnecessary and environmentally unsound highways. Eastern Europe's almost unquestioning acceptance of the Western political and economic model may be alarming to those who believe that current Western institutional arrangements must be radically changed if the world is to progress toward sustainable development. But the fact is that today, Eastern Europe especially looks towards Western Europe as the standard for the good life, and will not be content until it enjoys the same luxuries. The failure of "real socialism" has automatically been translated into the victory of "real free market capitalism."

More important than these similarities are the differences between the East Europeans and the Western academics. One difference is in the tone of their writings, and may be attributed to the impact of censorship in Eastern Europe. The chapters written by authors from the former socialist countries express more outrage, more frustration, in short, more emotion than do those written in the West. Kozeltsev talks of the "ecological crimes" of the old system that only now are coming to light, and categorically states that reform begins with access to information In a few sparse phrases, Peter condemns a situation in which the state held a monopoly on information but in which neither the populace, nor the academics, nor the authorities had real or accurate indices of environmental quality and pollution. Szacki stresses the enormous propaganda effort undertaken by the former socialist regimes to convince people that pollution was the price to pay for industrialization. He forcefully describes the activities of official environmental agencies as "formal motions" that erected "a screen to conceal the antienvironmental policy of the government." There is real and deep anger over the way censorship enabled the regimes to erect a facade of environmental concern around approaching environmental disaster.

A second difference that separates the East European from the Westerner is the different perspective on recent history. Both sides see a watershed in the democratic transition, but East Europeans place the decisive moment within the context of the last twenty or thirty years. Shvarts, for example, speaks of the "democratic embryo" started by Khrushchev. Szacki, Persanyi, Seserko, and Shvarts trace the beginnings of the environmental movement to the 1960s. All insist that not only were environmental problems becoming visible by the 1960s, but that conditions were ripe to force them to the leadership's attention. The environmental legislation of the 1970s is seen as the result of this initial activism. Shvarts especially stresses that strategy and tactics developed by environmental groups under the old regime were inappropriate under democratic conditions. Before the changes, tactics were intrinsically linked with bureaucratic practices. The success of the student movement lay in revealing the environmental wrongdoings of officialdom because the bureaucracy systematically prevented the students from tackling real environmental problems. As a result, when the scientists in the student movement were coopted into the government, the students found themselves pushed to the sidelines, watching the scientific institutes assume the task of providing the much-needed environmental solutions.

Persanyi, Szacki and Shvarts all emphasize the role of strong personalities in the formation of environmental groups under the old regime, as well as the importance of single issues, particularly on a local level. Szacki's description of the sociopolitical nature of the groups may be usefully compared to Shvarts's description of the defenders of democracy. The fact that tactics for the environmental movement were developed in a situation in which environmental activism was considered subversive made it difficult for the movement to survive the transition to democracy intact. Hence, in contrast to the Western authors, the East Europeans tend to present the environmental explosion at the end of the 1980s as the culmination of a long process, not the herald of a new political regime.

Finally, the East Europeans provide valuable insight into the politics behind the environmental movement both before and after the democratic revolution. In Hungary and Poland, we see the inability of the various groups to coalesce and take joint action. Attempts are made to develop coordinating umbrella structures, but none is successful. While the strong personality of a group leader was doubtless a mitigating factor, over and over again, the East Europeans express in various ways the lack of trust between the groups. Far from erasing the distrust, transition politics seems to have increased it There is no trust in the government. The East Europeans seem to concur on the inability of government to address environmental issues under the current unstable economic and political situation. But if the government cannot be looked upon as a source of redress, neither can any group apparently rely on another to initiate common action. On the contrary, each group looks at another's success or cooperation with a Western environmental group as proof of the power of money over environmental values. Peter, Szacki, and Shvarts are particularly illuminating in this regard. Jancar sees a lack of trust as a major reason for the failure of the Green candidates in the East European elections in 1990. The election results explain the reluctance of local environmental groups to cooperate among themselves, and they explain the passivity of the population regarding environmental issues after the transition.

We in the West who have never lived under a communist regime may comment on the system's success in developing anomie and a sense of isolation among the peoples subjected to it. Havel's "The Power of the Powerless" speaks to this very problem. People did what the regime expected them to do, just to be left in peace. Everyone acted the same way in public, so that you could not be sure of who your friends or enemies were except within a very small group of intimate acquaintances. Even then, as the opening of the East German Stasi records is showing, life-long friends turned on one another, husbands denounced their wives and wives their husbands. The climate of suspicion encouraged and fostered by the system made long-term, organized political opposition difficult if not impossible. The rapid decline in influence of the East European environmental movement is testimony to the success of the old system in preventing the emergence of a strong and coherent opposition. The system was brought down by the brief and virtually spontaneous fusion of many strands of opposition, as people poured into the streets to demonstrate their frustration with their leaders. But when the demonstrations ended, the seeds of distrust sown under the old regime sprouted anew.

As we move into the murky world of who knew whom and who trusts whom, we begin to understand the enormity of the problems confronting the former communist countries in their efforts to build democratic societies: fragmented political parties, low voter turnout, absence of a strong victory for any one political party, splintered non-governmental organizations.

Facing the initial attempts at pluralism are the old bureaucratic structures, determined to hold on to power at any cost. As Seserko, Shvarts, and Peter make clear, they are not easily dismissed. They will use all their political wiles to transform their former political power into economic power, and in so doing, undermine any governmental effort to tackle the environmental problems. Their arguments are persuasive and common to every public contest of political will: We stand for order, for security, for jobs. The country does not need revolution, but evolution. Nothing should be done in haste, and so on and so on. In Moscow, some people are asking for the old days back. The conclusion is inescapable that a strong popular environmental movement with wide public participation is essential if the transformation of the political and economic structures of these countries is to be successful.

We thus invite you to read this book, bearing in mind the symbolic character of the pretransition environmental movement. The new directions in environmental management are all to the West, from the West, and, to a large extent, must be by the West. Moreover, they must be constructed on the ruins of a system in which powerful bureaucratic interests ran roughshod over individuals and institutions they did not like, as well as their countries' environment and natural resources. They were successful because they were able by force and propaganda to sow sufficient distrust to prevent people from organizing on anything higher than an immediate personal level, and by making knowledge a privileged commodity, to keep most people from realizing the full scope of the harsh reality around them.

Hopefully, the reader will come away with a better appreciation of the enormity of the task confronting both the peoples and the governments of Eastern Europe, and of the necessity to make the environmental issue an integral part of any solution. We may well share the pessimism about the future expressed in many of the chapters, but we cannot fail to endorse the optimism implicit in the East Europeans' determination to move forward.

Note

1. Christian Science Monitor, January 17, 1992.

Part I
Problems and Changes in Environmental Management

2
Political and Social Changes in Poland

An Environmental Perspective

Jakub Szacki, Irmina Głowacka, Anna Liro, and Barbara Szulczewska

The Anti-Ecological Policies of “Real Socialism”

The ecological crisis in Poland and other countries coming out of "real socialism" is the result of a disastrous doctrine of economic development implemented over the past 45 years. This doctrine was based on the principle of granting priority to the development of two key branches of industry: raw materials and heavy industry. The output of these two types of industry was used to fuel further production, mainly of armaments, rather than consumer goods. This emphasis on the expansion of industries turning out the means of production was promoted to the rank of an "economic law" of socialism that was used to shape the economy in its characteristic branch-trade structure, eliminate markets, and institutionalize central planning.¹

The implementation of this principle led to the rise of a high energyand material-intensive form of industrial production with low efficiency in the use of available natural resources, causing systematic deterioration of the natural environment. The functio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• Part I Problems and Changes in Environmental Management
• Part II The Influence of Environmental Movements
• Index