Abstract
The 1970s’ ecological awareness triggered anxieties on different levels: global (acid rain, Ozone layers, global warming, extinction of species, environmental degradation, depletion of natural resources), national (planning, construction, pollution), local (forests, rivers, roads), and personal (health, quality of life). Germany’s unique geopolitical and historical condition added a distinct feature to what may be termed the ‘Politics of Angst’ phenomenon. Thus, whereas in the Cold War context, the arms-race escalated and nuclear weapons threatened most countries, Germany, positioned on the front-line between the power blocks, with its special ties to the West, was pressurised to remilitarise.1 This generated a wave of anti-militarism, in addition to anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism and an identification with Third World movements, as part of a general condemnation of material society represented by the USA. At the European level, Germany’s geographical situation divided it between the West and the East, with a potential war between the two factions of the one nation. Many Germans called for a neutral, unified Germany in the tradition of Mitteleuropa. In the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the mounting disillusionment with the political system’s ability to provide existential security, reinforced by the recession following the oil crisis, questioned the system as a whole and gave momentum to the protest movements. The oil crisis manifested the new salience of the natural limits to economic growth.
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Notes
P. Pulzer, German Politics 1945–1995 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 58.
The German basisdemokratisch is usually translated into ‘grassroots’. I propose to use ‘basisdemocracy’ since, as shall become apparent, basisdemocracy is instrumental to the understanding of the self-perception of the German Greens based on the two concepts — base and democracy. Base is fundamental to the way the Greens conceptualised their difference from other political parties, in terms of their relation to their base of support. It has also a distinctive appeal to the New Left groups coalescing in the Greens, due to the connotation of base-superstructure in Marxism. The name further discloses their critique of representative democracy, advocating democratisation of the base, applying the subsidiarity principle. Since these interpretations are entangled with the notion of basisdemocracy, and grassroots discloses only one facet of this rich repertoire I decided to use the original. For an explication of basisdemocracy for the Greens, see D. Salomon, ‘Grüne Theorie und Graue Wirklichkeit: Die Grünen und die Basisdemokratie’ (Freiburger Schriften zur Politikwissenschaft 4, 1992).
J. Beuys, ‘Aufruf zur Alternative’, in Heidt (ed.), Abschied vom Wachstumswahn (Zurich: Achberger, 1980), 169.
H. Gruhl, Ein Planet wird geplündert (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1975);
E. Eppler, Ende oder Wende? (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1975);
C. Amery Natur also Politik (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1976). For a discussion, see van Hüllen, 38–47.
Kelly and Leinen (eds) Prinzip Leben: Ökopax (Berlin: Verlag Olle & Wolter, 1982), 119.
In an interview, in M. Schroeren, Die Grünen (Wien: Ueberreuter, 1990), 172.
S. Aschheim, ‘Nazism, Normalcy and the German Sonderweg’, in M. Zimmermann (ed.), Germany’s Singular History (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1989);
Stöss, Politics against Democracy (New York: Berg, 1991).
See S. Volkov, The Rise of Popular Antimodernism in Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).
See G. Mosse, The Crisis of the German Ideology (New York: Universal Library, 1964).
See A. Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
For an eye-opening discussion, see G. Kvistad, ‘Between State and Society: Green Political Ideology in the Mid-1980s’, West European Politics 10, 1987: 211–28.
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© 2002 Gayil Talshir
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Talshir, G. (2002). Formation: Ecological Roots of a Political Route. In: The Political Ideology of Green Parties. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919892_3
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