Twenty Years of European Greens
1984 - 2004
edited by Arnold Cassola & Per Gahrton
Dirk Janssens
Ecolo (Belgium)
- Secretary of the Coordination 1983 - 1984
- Coordination Secretariat Member 1984 - 1986
I got seriously involved in politics in 1981 right before the elections that brought Agalev and Ecolo first as green parties into a national parliament. On an international level, at that time there had been a ‘Coordination of green and radical parties’ with no structure and continuity except that provided by the secretariat, which was, in the hands of the PPR, the Dutch radicals who had members of parliament. The PPR was a traditional small leftist party with some definite green ideas. But at that time the party was already dreaming of a merger with the PSP (Pacifist Socialist Party) and the CPN (Dutch Communist Party). The other so-called ‘radical’ party was the Partito Radicale of Italy, which had almost nothing in common with the Dutch PPR. In Germany Die Grünen had won already some regional elections and was completely focused on its own development and on the preparation of the federal German elections of 1983.
In that framework Agalev and Ecolo took the initiative to call a meeting of only green parties. This meeting took place in Brussels on March 26th and 27th 1983. The green parties present at that meeting decided to work towards taking part in the European elections of 1984 on the basis of a joint platform that was presented at a first European congress in Liège in the spring of 1984. At that congress the European Greens were also formally created with a secretariat of four co-secretaries with Sara Parkin of the British Ecology Party, Per Gahrton of the Swedish Miliöpartiet, Bruno Boissière of the French Les Verts and myself of the Flemish Belgian Agalev as secretaries.
The green philosophy is in its essence so international and border crossing that the creation of an international organisation from these emerging parties was very challenging but rewarding. Several of the parties were in favour of the existence of a United Europe, but some were absolutely against ‘at the time’. Frustrating, because the interest in European politics in many of these emerging green parties was not always evident. Most of those parties were coping with all the problems that new parties have. In some countries rival parties claimed to be the true green party and wanted to use a structure like the European Greens to prove that they were ‘more’ green then their rivals. And it was frustrating also because the German “Die Grünen”, the most visible green party internationally at the time, had almost no interest at all in what we tried to do with the European Greens. Those things changed only slowly after the European elections of 1984 and the election of green members to the European Parliament.
When I look back at that period I have to think of how different international politics were at the time. The Berlin Wall and the Cold War were still a fact. We were fighting against the twin-track decision of NATO to install cruise missiles in Europe to counter the USSR’s SS-20s. George Bush Senior was only Vice-President of the USA. Green Politics was still young and was ‘THE’ radical and new opposition to the ‘established’ parties of the right AND of the left. Being part of governments and the establishment seemed very far away.
This has all changed and green parties have lost their virginity and innocence. Several are or have been part of national governments, endorsing the kinds of politics that we were so much against in the early eighties. In my view, it is often almost impossible to find the difference between the present green parties’ policies and that of socialists or social democrats. The present greens are prone to come up with suffocating rules and regulations for every aspect of life from the cradle to the grave very much in contradiction with the potential libertarian views of green thinking of twenty years ago. That all saddens me and so nowadays I can’t vote for the greens anymore although in my heart I still feel like a real green.
Finally I want to make a last tribute to the magnificent voluntary work at our meetings of a group of dedicated professional interpreters of the European Parliament in the early years of the European Greens.
