The Green Movement in West Germany (RLE: German Politics)

Elim Papadakis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138846296
• eBook ISBN: 9781317540298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Green Movement in Germany is widely regarded as one of the most powerful expressions of popular opposition to government policies. A broad analysis of this powerful group is made in this book, showing that the origins of the movement relate to the general protests against industrialisation in the nineteenth century and also to more recent forms of protest. The author assesses the challenge posed by the Green Movement to established groups and organisations both in proposing alternative policies and in a long run of electoral successes. The Green Movement has evidently had a great impact on assumptions about defence, welfare and environmental policies. Data from major surveys on public attitudes and interviews with senior officials complete the picture of the practical and theoretical dimensions of the Green Movement.

Chapter One
Origins of the Green Movement

The emergence of the Green Movement is, as I have emphasized, not based solely on features peculiar to the political climate in West Germany. Similar movements have risen and declined throughout the post-war period in different countries. However, the outstanding characteristic of the Green Movement has been its durability over a period of several years (ever since 1975) and its success in maintaining the support of those sections of the electorate that have become detached from the main political parties, particularly the Social Democrats. In this chapter I will only assess the relatively recent (post-war) origins of the Green Movement.

I Post-war protest movements

In the post-war era the first generation of young people to protest against their society were the 'Beatniks' who, beaten by the system, sought 'beatitude' in another world.(1) Above all they were opposed to the threat of nuclear destruction and the corruption of society. Their alienation from the 'official' system was expressed by Jack Kerouac in his novel On the Road. In a famous passage, the narrator describes his feelings when he arrives back in his home town, having wandered as a hobo all over the United States:

Suddenly I found myself on Times Square I had travelled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling for ever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream - grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. The high towers of the land - the other end of the land, the place where Paper America is born.(2)

This subjective analysis of the system tended to overlook the social contradictions which existed in the early 1950s. However, the Beatniks added an 'existential' dimension to political analysis. Although they did not relate the emphasis on individual freedom to collective freedom, there was a link between their beliefs and the way they lived their lives in practice.(3) The 'beat' culture was later to exercise a powerful influence on the American and West European student movements.(4)

In Western Europe the Beatniks formed groups in which nationality was no barrier and they travelled between all the major cities from North to South, often depending on the season of the year. They occasionally took part in demonstrations against nuclear energy and militarism. Above all they provoked discussions over norms, values and ways of life because of their rejection of the ethics of work, achievement and consumption.

Both in the United States and in the Netherlands there emerged, in the early 1960s, groups which sought to put these ideas into practice. The 'Provos' in the Netherlands made demands similar to those of the West German Green Movement in the 1980s. They demanded free public transport, the disarmament of the police, a ban on advertising for alcohol and tobacco and the introduction of measures to curb pollution of the atmosphere.(5) Hollstein notes a similar attempt to offer constructive ideas by the Hippies in the United States. He also stresses that the idea that all those who joined the movement simply wanted to 'drop out' is misleading since most of them were not 'fleeing' from society but were leaving it in order to build a new order of values. In contrast to the earlier generation of Beatniks, they tried to offer a positive counter-image to the 'negative' world. Whilst there were many different types of Hippie - including those who were and those who were not on drugs - they were all dissenters.(6) Their missionary zeal and moral selfrighteousness meant that most of them did not have material support from their parents, even though they were mostly from a wealthy background. Thus ten per cent were from upper class, fifty per cent from middle class, twenty per cent from lower middle class and five per cent from lower class families.(7) Above all, they felt a general discomfort with the American way of life. Most joined the movement for emotional reasons such as a quarrel with their parents, failure at school, the quest for adventure, or because they had been influenced by the ideas of writers like Ginsberg or Herman Hesse. Very few joined as a result of a careful evaluation of capitalist society. Their world-view was intuitive and their search for truth was centred around themselves. The demonstrations against the Vietnam War did, however, offer an important focus of unity for this diverse protest.(8)

The Hippies' belief in the power of love and understanding and other ideals was so powerful that they seriously neglected building any infrastructure and consequently the threat of hunger, sickness and chaos in the Hippie communities became very real. The idea of building shops, hospitals, restaurants and clubs for the Hippie community came from the so-called Diggers, who have been described as the 'politicised flower children'.(9) The Diggers established contact with existing land communes which led to better organisation, the setting up of clinics and self-help schemes as well as the opening of 'free shops' in various American cities and in Western Europe. The action by the Diggers was an important historical step in the formation of the 'counter-societal' or alternative movement.(10) The solipsism of the Hippies gave way to a desire to confront the political and economic power of the 'system'. Thus a Youth International Party (YIP/ Yippies) was formed and included people like Ginsberg, Hoffmann and Rubin. It was not a traditional party; rather, it stood for action, street politics, agitation and 'guerilla-theatre'.(11)

Whilst many Hippies had either taken to drugs or gone home, many joined the YIP. In October 1967 the Hippie movement consciously buried itself because of its own contradictions and the wave of commercialism that had begun to make profits out of the Hippie culture. Meanwhile the Yippies tried to carry the values of this movement in to society. Politics was understood existentially, growing out of the life of the actors and indivisible from this life. There was however a tendency for political action to assume the character of playfulness. Provocation developed a dynamic of its own which hardly related meaningfully to the reality of the United States. As with the Hippies, the Yippies fell into the trap of neglecting organisation and structures and relying too much on spontaneous and permanent revolution.

II Student movement

West European protest movements in the sixties were strongly influenced by the Hippies and Yippies. This reflected, moreover, the continuing influence of the Beatniks. In the Federal Republic many young people felt alienated from the political culture and this was most clearly expressed by an introspective movement, the Ohne-mich Bewegung, which turned its back on a society which, only a few years after the war, was discussing the issue of re-armament. Later on, the anti-authoritarian movement of the 1960s was influenced by the activities of intellectuals who sought to link the disputes in Marxist theory with the attempt to use psycho-analytic categories to help with group-dynamic and individual problems. Communes were seen as places in which an individual could raise his or her 'consciousness' and also as a base from which change could be carried in to society. The practical experience of the well-known 'Kommune 1' and'Kommune 2' showed how difficult it was to achieve this. In the same manner as the Provos in the Netherlands, and the Yippies in the United States, the communards in West Germany relied on their ability to 'ridicule authority'. When this met with only limited success greater emphasis was laid on the 'revolution of the self', and on experiments in communal living. 'Kommune 2' was actively involved in the opening of the first antiauthoritarian 'kindergartens' in West Berlin. Later communes, particularly feminist ones, were mainly concerned with the creation of an alternative to the nuclear family. Most communes sought to change the 'consciousness' of the members. Thus the 'Linkeck' commune asked itself whether it was possible to develop and practice a form of life which 'can absorb if not totally abolish, the forces of competition, fear of existence, pressure towards achievement, and isolation, in a milder form of living and working together'.(12)

The communal movement was absorbed into broader subcultural tendencies which were characterised by the separation of aims between those directed towards a change of the individual and his or her 'consciousness' and those directed towards social change. Thus the dialectical relationship between the two aims which the communes had encouraged was not realised. As with the Hippie movement in the United States many turned towards the use of drugs and psychedelic techniques and meditation as a means of self-liberation, and others, following the dissolution of the anti-authoritarian movement formed ad-hoc groups relating to factories and the process of production, internationalism, consumption, universities, environmental issues, schools, marginal groups, the media, art, the law and medicine. These groups tried to constitute, in their social practice, a counter-power to the one that prevailed in society. They then became the point of departure for efforts towards the formation of a variety of communist groups and parties. Peter Brueckner, an apologist for the original communal movement, described the process which occured from mid-1968 onwards as one of Entmischung (separation). Two intentions developed: on the one hand, to change 'consciousness' and the whole structure of interrelationships and, on the other hand, to come to terms with relations in the sphere of production, political' education and class analysis.(13)

III Citizens' Initiatives

Whilst the initiatives which were formed as a consequence of the disintegration of the antiauthoritarian movement attempted to come closer to social reality and 'proletarian consciousness', they only met with limited success. The gap between these groups and the rest of society was, to some extent, bridged by so-called Citizens' Initiatives (Buergerinitiativen) which had developed quite separately even though, as will soon become apparent their emergence was facilitated by the actions of the protest movements in the late sixties. The origins of the Citizens' Initiatives can be traced back to the Citizens' Associations (Buergervereine) of the fifties and sixties. The Citizens' Associations were formed by well-educated,middle-class dignitaries in order to press for community or special interests in a local situation which had become 'de-politicised'. Through associations and endowments, demands were made and projects set up to deal with local needs. The claim of the major parties to represent people's interests was thus modestly challenged and individuals showed that they were not prepared to restrict their political activity to casting a vote periodically.(14) This challenge was broadened by the advent of the student movement. As Roth has stated, the transition from an initiative of dignitaries to a Citizens' Initiative 'would not have been conceivable without the uncertainties caused by the extra-parliamentary protest movements in the sixties and the defects in the infrastructure which became apparent with the recession of 1966-7'.(15) Liberal circles reacted with the demand for greater democratic participation and some of the pre-existing Citizens' Associations became Citizens' Initiatives once the political and social limits of the former had become apparent in the new situation. This transition was marked by an awareness of local conditions (such as the lack of public services), a conscious widening of the social base and a broadening of political fields of action. There was much rational discussion, in contrast to the subjective tactics of provocation employed by the anti-authoritarian student movement.

The transformation of the Liberal Free Democrats (FDP) made them the party most open to the citizens who wanted reforms through action by Citizens' Initiatives. Reformers like Scheel, Flach and Dahrendorf now replaced the national liberalism of the earlier Liberals. The lack of a broad social base and the lively youth organisation of the FDP also made it easier for this party to attract the support of the Citizens' Initiatives. Such was the attraction of the FDP for these initiatives that even in 1975 when the euphoria about reforms had subsided, an FDP candidate was supported by them in the communal elections in Kaiserstuhl, Baden-Wuerttemberg, and gained seventy per cent of the vote in a commune where there was strong opposition to a planned nuclear power station.(16) Although middle-class Citizens' Initiatives and other protest groups were separate, the former were influenced by the remains of the anti-authoritarian movement. Thus an early publication on Citizens' Initiatives referred to initiatives, on the one hand, by parents who sought a more liberated educational system and the creation of 'parent-child' groups and, on the other hand, by groups which were concerned with issues such as homelessness and squatting.(17)

The 'proletarian' orientation of many people within the New Left signalled a move away from what what were considered to be 'petty-bourgeois' and middle-class initiatives. The latter were only taken seriously wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Dedication
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. ORIGINS OF THE GREEN MOVEMENT
• 2. THEMES AND CONCEPTS (1)
• 3. THEMES AND CONCEPTS (2)
• 4. ECOLOGY MOVEMENT
• 5. THE RESPONSE OF ESTABLISHED GROUPS
• 6. ALTERNATIVE MOVEMENT
• 7. PEACE MOVEMENT
• 8. THE GREEN PARTY
• 9. THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATS UNDER THREAT
• 10. FUNCTIONAL ASPECTS OF THE GREEN MOVEMENT
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX