Twenty Years of European Greens
1984 - 2004
edited by Arnold Cassola & Per Gahrton
Ludo Dierickx AGALEV (Belgium)
- former MP
-
convener of 1989 Apparentement meeting for European elections
In the beginning (1979) we all believed that the green movement was the authentic new political opposition movement at the end of the century and on the threshold of a new age. The movement was very new in the industrialised world and opposed to the major aims of most nations: more expansion, more competition, more consumption. The greens felt themselves as being the only alternative to all those who wanted more of everything. All the political parties, all the governments, all the industrialists, all the trade unions wanted to produce more automobiles, more energy, more concrete, etc. The greens developed a great number of different activities. Some, like Erich Kitzmüller from Austria, hoped that these actions would result in a global vision, in a comprehensive ecological theory. The revolution should be profound: new intellectual tools were implicitly proposed to measure and compare the wealth and the growth of the economy of the nations.
Greens, such as Orio Giarini, Genève or the German Greens, confronted their ecological vision of the “value in use” of goods, products and services with the vision of Adam Smith and David Ricardo of the “value in exchange”, accepted also by Karl Marx. The greens did not just verbally propose but proved by their moral attitudes and their extra-parliamentary actions that they were a new political force, able to offer solutions for an overpopulated, over industrialised, over-armed, polluted and threatened world. They were not in government and they could be proud of their courage, of the logic of their thinking, of the immediate and long-run necessity of their demands. They were not in government and they did not have to justify their presence and to show how many concrete measures they obtained from other partners who tried, not without success, to put the problems in their terms and at their level.
For the greens, many times embraced by socialists and other parties, it was not easy to oppose in parliaments, it was even more difficult to do this in governments, where the central idea remained always: more expansion, more competition, more consumption, for good and bad reasons. It was easier to be proud of arguments and of the political battle in which greens were involved than of the little results obtained through governmental action. Merits could always be contested, as was the case recently in Belgium. Although “ small is beautiful “ prevailed in many minds, a great number of greens was convinced that green policy had to be international, trans-national, and if possible, democratic and supranational.
International thinking was for greens not a luxury as it was for socialists or Christian-democrats, who could afford to limit their action to one state. You cannot protect life on earth by acting only in one state, in one region. After a period of hesitation, typified by the rejection of the Treaty of Maastricht by many greens, they started to understand that a European democracy could not function without European democratic parties. Greens could not demand more European democracy and not start to organise European democracy on the level of their own parties. An important but difficult job. Even in Belgium, Agalev and Ecolo did not succeed in becoming one federal party, whereas they form a single political group in the Belgian parliament. For the reasons mentioned before the greens should be the first to take part in the next European elections with a common European list, emanation of one green European federal and democratic party.
