Twenty Years of European Greens
1984 - 2004
edited by Arnold Cassola & Per Gahrton
Johan Hamels
Agalev (Belgium)
- EGC
delegate in Majvik, Finland 1993
It was a challenging endeavour we worked on. Having different opinions and visions on how the green political structure should work, we came together in the early summer of 1993 in Helsinki not knowing whether we would obtain any result.
But we had worked on it for long months, with several meetings in Brussels, Amsterdam and other places in Europe. I remember the working groups for the programmatic documents and the new statutes. At the end of the 80s and in the early 90s the Green Coordination was confronted with its limits. A creation of the mid 80s, it had limitations that were preventing us from playing the role green voters wanted us to play. The enlargement of the Federation to the Eastern Green Parties after the collapse of the Communist regimes was an administrative nightmare. And worse, we were unable to express a European wide position on the First Gulf war. We had to adapt our European political Coordination to the new challenges of the post Cold War period.
Participating in this preparatory period of the Federation build up was probably one of the most exciting times, as the green political movement at European level had to live up to the expectations of its electorate. After nearly ten years of representation in national and European parliaments the green political movement had to adapt its tools and strategies to the growing aspirations in the parties and the expectations of the green voters.
Luckily, all the green parties had been given ample time and chance to participate in the drafting of the basic documents of the Green Federation. The key to everything was that right from the start of the work the aim was clear. We wanted a Federation with structures that would allow for qualified decisions and where all parties would be represented in a balanced way, based on a political document that would give us a continent-wide profile, whilst allowing for the diversity our movement is rich in.
And then there was the Helsinki atmosphere. All participants, was it the Swedish or the Belgians, were aware of the need to find ways to get everybody on board. Instead of confrontation we looked for common ground, with regards to our project. What especially motivated this search for common ground was the intuition that our project was to have a structure that was valid for the whole European continent whilst, at the same time, having the necessary tools to play our role in the European Union institutions.
We all remember the voting, where unanimity was needed. The songs we embarked on were a good example of how our political motivations are in essence human motivations: building together a better place for all human beings and other creatures. I think it was the Finnish mid-summer sun that made a healthy birthday possible!
