European Green Movements

The European green movements are the individual diverse movements and struggles that emerged in the post-World War II period through explicitly politicizing aspects of the environment. These movements have taken markedly different forms in different places and times and have been organized around multiple grievances. One of the striking aspects of the green movements is their political heterogeneity, and many green activists have explicitly disrupted notions of left and right. Members of the German Green Party (Die Grünen) famously entered the Bundestag in 1983 with the slogan “Neither left nor right—but straight ahead.” The European green movement has made important interventions in the style of doing politics and what counts as politics. It comprises a diverse set of organizational and political forms including direct action, parliamentary parties, nongovernmental organizations, and local environmental campaigns and has had a major impact in making the environment and biopolitics central political issues of our times.

These movements emerged from and have developed a set of plural and contested trajectories. These include the (often rather conservative) conservation groups as well as the more explicitly countercultural politics associated with the New Left. The relations between the European Green Movement and the New Left demand significant attention. Thus New Left activists of the 1960s and 1970s often translated their political activity into emerging social movements such as the German Green Movement and played a key role in articulating green politics away from an authoritarian, conservative agenda. Similarly, the currents of radical politics established in 1968 in Paris had underground afterlives in the work of activists such as Jose Bové, who shaped Left articulations of environmental politics in rural France.

New Left currents also shaped the emergence of environmentalism in Eastern Europe in the postwar period. Dissidents like Rudolf Bahro shaped an independent Marxist/Left politics that had an impact on cross-European debates through its engagement with environmental politics. Under state socialism, conservationists and nascent environmental activists worked under extremely difficult organizing conditions to bring the environmental problems of “actually existing socialism” into contestation. In Czechoslovakia, a movement for “conservation and environmental education” was formed in 1958, which led to some politicization of environmental issues. In Poland, “escape to nature” movements based on a critique of everyday life in the socialist city were prominent in cities such as Katowice, whereas other urban movements politicized the socioecological problems of the city. The mobilizing of [Page 1033]such environmental claims and politics played a central role in the struggles for democratization throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the period of transition, however, the conditions for environmental nongovernmental organizations and campaigns have often been fraught with risks. In Slovakia, for example, movements such as Greenpeace Slovakia and Za Matku Zem (for Mother Earth) have faced harassment and criticism.

Members of the Green Party protest with atomic barrels in front of the Vattenfall customer center in Hamburg, Germany, July 8, 2009. The protest is directed against the operation of the atomic power plant Kruemmel by the energy provider Vattenfall. The plant's reactor was shut down as a result of a short circuit in a transformer on July 4, 2009.

Source: Maurizio Gambarini/EPA/Corbis.

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