Twenty Years of European Greens
1984 - 2004
edited by Arnold Cassola & Per Gahrton
Gerhard Jordan
Die Grünen (Austria)
- Coordination Secretariat Member 1989 - 1991
I have been member of the Co-Secretariat of the European Green Coordination (EGC) from 1989 till 1991. This period was particularly interesting because the Green Parties in Central and Eastern Europe began to emerge and became part of the political systems of their countries.
Coming from Vienna (Austria), I was the geographically nearest Co-Sec member to Central Europe, and during 1990 I visited Greens in Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. We found out that the conditions for Green politics in the CEE countries were quite different: Government participation of Green Parties in the Baltic Republics and Slovenia; support by environmental movements in Slovakia and Bulgaria; difficulties resulting from the late founding date of the Green Party in Hungary (compared to other new parties); similarity to Western social movements in the GDR.
At the end of 1990, only the Greens from Estonia and the GDR (the latter finally merged with the West German Greens) were full members of EGC. Like the European Union some years later, the European Green Coordination had to deal with the necessity of its own enlargement towards the East. During an EGC coordination meeting in Budapest in March 1990 that was overshadowed by tensions within the host party the problems of this process became visible.
Despite structural difficulties, we enforced debates on contents. The most important one was on a memorandum of the EGC on the occasion of the CSCE summit in Paris in November 1990. Issues like criticism of NATO, of increasing nationalism and suppression of minorities and of building new walls against migrants and refugees were addressed. The demands for effective action against the greenhouse effect as well as for a non-military solution of the Iraq crisis show that most of the issues we faced in 1990 are still acute today.
