Green Politics in the New Germany
Joppke, Christian & Markovits, Andrei S.
The West German Green party had an ironic relationship to the West German Federal Republic. While the self-styled "anti-party party" found its identity in all-out opposition to the...
...The conflict had become so acute recently that a special party conference needed to be convened in October 1993 in Bonn...
...A prime example are the Greens (GAL) of Hamburg...
...As the former dissident (and 236 • DISSENT Green Politics current representative of Alliance 90 in the Bundestag) Gerd Poppe put it, "for the sake of the great peace we were to dispense with human rights...
...Above all, it mirrored the sheltered prosperity, political provincialism, and postnationalism that future historians will recognize as the signature of the Bonn republic...
...The revamped East German Communist party became the catalyst of the Fundis' eventual loss...
...For its part, that state had in many ways become a Green republic...
...Although the German political class has good reasons to worry, this is not so for the Greens...
...The response came in early 1993, when the Western Greens formally coalesced with the Alliance 90, the electoral platform of the Eastern dissident movement...
...The core electoral base of the Greens is estimated at a solid 8 percent nationwide, and in recent state elections they have far surpassed this mark...
...Reflecting the German postwar left's aversion to the principles of nationhood and the nation-state, the Greens continue to advocate a policy of open borders and unrestricted settlement that is at odds with the dramatic migration movements of postcommunist Europe...
...They did not want to surrender this as readily as their East German compatriots did by voting their old state out of existence...
...But the cracks in the pacifist front have been real...
...In addition, the former dissidents now loudly deplore the implicit collaboration of the West German political elite—including the Greens—with the old East German regime...
...The overwhelming majority of the party reconfirmed the traditional pacifist creed of unconditional nonviolence by rejecting any military intervention in Bosnia or elsewhere...
...Here, as elsewhere in Europe, politics is undergoing significant qualitative changes...
...It is not merely the sheer quantity of the ballots that makes this year so important...
...In the tradition of the left, the Greens' identity was universalist...
...Thus we may expect a swift reversal of Green positions if a federal government coalition between the Greens and the Social Democrats becomes a numerical possibility...
...At the Thirteenth Party Convention in 1991, the Greens finally abandoned the debilitating principle of office rotation that had been intended to counteract careerism among activists...
...If a big chunk of this protest vote is likely to go to the Greens, it will go to a party that now appears thoroughly democratic, professionalized, and willing to compromise...
...Nevertheless, this episode once again confirmed the troubled relationship of the German New Left to the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and the state of Israel...
...These new Greens are open to coalition formation with the Social Democrats, or even the conservative Christian Democrats on the local level...
...Throughout the Greens' first ten years, this struggle pitted the party's "Realo" faction, advocates of reform and coalition building with the Social Democrats, against the "Fundi" faction, which fiercely rejected any compromises with the established powers that be...
...He added that the party "is not yet adjusted to the new challenges...
...The radical Fundis, whose dominance of the party's key positions had never been backed by comparable rank-and-file support, found their anti-capitalist rhetoric outdistanced by events...
...Three of the eleven seats in the new party's executive committee are reserved for the Alliance, and the Alliance also furnishes one of its two spokespersons...
...One result was Western disregard for the plight of the potentially "destabilizing" dissident movements in East Germany and elsewhere in Eastern Europe...
...The West German Greens' noble refusal to "annex" their Green sister party in the East caused the Greens as a whole narrowly to fail the 5 percent threshold for representation in the Bundestag in the first all-German elections of December 1990...
...This is ironic, because in domestic regard the Greens still refuse to recognize the state's monopoly of violence and advocate the use of "counterviolence" by social movements...
...This movement's retroactive denunciation of Western "leftist" discourse obviously entails a certain distortion of its own ambiguous past...
...The sudden collapse of communism hastened SPRING • 1994 • 235 Green Politics the final round in this intraparty conflict...
...Too leftist," "too feminist," were some of the typical East German dissident responses to the stance of their Western counterparts...
...They have SPRING • 1994 • 239 Green Politics entered coalition governments with Social Democrats and Liberals in Hesse, Bremen, Brandenburg, and Lower Saxony...
...121-148...
...The West German Green party had an ironic relationship to the West German Federal Republic...
...More in line with traditional Green sentiments was party spokesperson Christian StrObele's remark that Iraq's attack on Israel was "the logical, almost necessary consequence of Israel's policy toward the Palestinians and the Arab states...
...Accordingly, the peace movement that had reemerged in a nationwide campaign almost overnight remained peculiarly devoid of prominent leadership...
...Although these changes embellish the "professional" image of the Greens, they are not without risk...
...Integrating the East German Dissidents The second challenge concerns the integration of the East German dissident movement...
...Its "civic" redefinition is one of the most important political tasks today...
...Formerly a bastion of dogmatic Fundis, the GAL is now firmly in the hands of Realos—a shift that was recently rewarded with 13 percent of the statewide vote, the best Green election result ever in Hamburg...
...In January 1993, the Greens of Hamburg even passed a resolution calling for military intervention by United Nation troops against Serbia, with German participation...
...The departure of the Fundis cleared the way for the Greens to establish themselves as a reform-oriented ecology party...
...Peace" and "security partnership" had been the key mantras in the age of detente among Eastern and Western elites...
...Similarly, the Greens fiercely rejected the recent restrictions on Article 16 of the Basic Law, which guaranteed automatic admission to anyone who claimed to be a political refugee— some 438,000 individual claimants in 1992 alone...
...Epitomizing the prevailing mood, a peace movement leader confessed that he "would rather be on a ship of fools than on an aircraft carrier...
...In 1984, a Green parliamentary delegation had used a visit to Israel to "condemn Israel's terror" in the Occupied Territories, thus creating the delicate situation of Germans denouncing Jewish "terror...
...Even after the painful defeat in the 1990 federal elections, the party has bounced back mightily...
...But one of the most striking features of the Greens has always been their ability to win electoral successes despite internal turmoil over profile and program...
...If there had been any doubt, the disastrous outcome of the 1990 elections brought the urgency of this need home to the Greens...
...Fischer's achievement has been to make the Greens acceptable as coalition partners...
...But the Serbian aggression further crystallized the split between "bellicists" and "pacifists" in the Green party...
...Part of the party's charm consisted in its chaotic yet participatory mores, which made the Greens a platform of civil society unparalleled by any other party in the Federal Republic...
...Reforms were introduced to streamline the party's legendarily chaotic decision-making structures...
...The center no longer seems to hold...
...Until lately in postwar Germany, the grand issues of political conflict turned mainly on allocation of resources and democratic procedure...
...This label is no small concession to the East German Alliance, considering that the membership of the latter amounted to less than one-tenth of that of the West German party...
...With very few exceptions, the Western Greens had embraced a detente mentality which allowed criticism of human rights violations in Nicaragua or Argentina, but not in East Germany or Czechoslovakia...
...On behalf of the pacifists, skeptical military leaders and peace movement supporters produce "realistic" scenarios purporting to show the futility of a clear military solution to the muddled ethnic war in Bosnia...
...Finally, the East German dissidents have prided themselves on guarding their independence...
...Toward an Ecological Reform Party What are these challenges...
...The peace movement, so visible and vocal in its opposition to the Gulf War in 1991, had all but disappeared in 1992...
...Both gravitated toward the PDS, the former Communists...
...the prevention of genocide entails special German obligations after Auschwitz that may override the requirements of nonviolence...
...The East German dissidents, in particular, are obviously not prepared to continue sacrificing human rights on the altar of peace...
...The initial Green reflex to the U.S.-led 238 • DISSENT Green Politics attack on Iraq was to inveigh against "American imperialism...
...Children of the postnational Bonn republic, the Greens failed to see the national implications of the East German revolution, as indicated in their futile commitment to a reformed socialist GDR (East Germany...
...The raison d'etre of the Greens has been their close connection to extraparliamentary social movements...
...Although one can sympathize with this position, the question remains whether the evasion of nationhood and nation-state is politically expedient...
...This not only reconfirms the Greens' traditional pacifism, but also attests to their continued discomfort with Germany's integration into the Western alliance structures...
...This seems to be the direction the party is now taking...
...Moreover, the past preoccupation of East German dissidents with peace, ecology, and third world concerns (which was exceptional in Eastern Europe) conveys the paradoxical influence of the West's "new social movements" east of the Wall...
...To be sure, the ethnic definition of nationhood in Germany is a deplorable anomaly in Western Europe...
...Under him, the party has grown adept at playing the political game, holding realpolitical gains more important than empty programmatic rhetoric...
...In foreign policy, the "Genscherist" advocacy of peace, dialogue, and nonaggression was likewise couched in greenish colors...
...Out of concern for East German sensibilities, the new party, founded in January 1993 in Hannover, named itself "Alliance 90-Greens...
...240 • DISSENT...
...For all of them, Munich-style appeasement was a patently inadequate response to unbridled dictatorial aggression...
...While the Fundis opted for an all-German leftist coalition with the former Communists, the Green party's majority rejected this solution...
...Yet the East German dissidents also carried the disillusioning experience of forty years of dictatorship, which made them ill at ease with the "anti-system" rhetoric and "radical chic" that flourished among some Western Greens...
...For Hungary, Poland, or the Czech Republic, NATO means not only protection from the turmoil of the disintegrating Soviet empire, but also affirmation of their bona fide Western identity...
...But more sensible Greens noticed that a strictly pacifist stance conflicted with the Jewish state's moral and political right to exist...
...The resolution caused a storm of protest within the party, leading to its eventual withdrawal...
...But it also is: Never again Auschwitz...
...Their election platform of 1990 even rejects an American-style immigration law based on quotas of admission...
...Two years later, Oskar Lafontaine, the "Greenish" Social Democratic front-runner in 1990 credited with "stealing" some 600,000 voters from the Greens, maliciously remarked that "many members and supporters of the Greens are still stuck in mourning the old Federal Republic...
...The Greens are profiting from the avalanche of voter disaffection against "status quo parties" that is creating havoc all across Europe...
...Although this surprising defeat resulted partly from strategic blunders, it also reveals more far-reaching difficulties of the Greens in coping with the events of 1989...
...As a direct consequence of the Greens' engagement, the Federal Republic developed the strictest environmental protection laws anywhere in the world...
...The Green disavowal of the conservative campaign to "normalize" history in the interest of a "healthy" national identity is commendable...
...The war in Bosnia predictably did not spark any "peace" rally in Germany...
...The first arises from the tension, deeply embedded in the Greens' history, between uncompromising radicalism and reform...
...The Green maxim that "in Germany the national question can never be claimed by the left" only allows the recent antiforeigner movements to claim it from the other side of the political spectrum...
...Alliance 90 and the Greens are now represented in thirteen of the sixteen German state parliaments...
...Geopolitics and Nonviolence The final challenge to the Green party arises from geopolitics and international relations...
...StrObele's controversial remark cost him his job in the Green party...
...The central rally of 200,000 in Bonn in January 1991 was reminiscent of the huge peace rallies in opposition to the deployment of Euromissiles ten years earlier, but received no official endorsement from the Green party's leadership...
...The Green advocacy of a "multicultural * We take the triple distinction of allocative, procedural, and citizenship conflicts from Herbert Kitschelt, "The 1990 German Federal Election and the National Unification," West European Politics 14(4), 1991, pp...
...Given the moderate politics of the former dissidents, these concessions also further strengthen the Realo faction of the Greens and thus will accelerate the party's departure from the radical left...
...However, the Gulf War and the Serbian aggression against Bosnia have left serious cracks in the Greens' pacifism...
...One of the core pillars of Green identity is the party's strict insistence on nonviolence in interstate relations...
...There the bellicists suffered a decisive defeat...
...But the programmatic insistence on nonviolence between states reflects the Greens' close relationship to the peace movement of the early 1980s, the broadest mass movement in the history of the Federal Republic...
...The new issue requires the particularistic drawing of boundaries, something which has always been the prerogative of the political right...
...In the politics of protest, after all, they are well versed...
...Surely the left must engage in the redefinition of German national identity, rather than seeking to flee it...
...Thus it was fitting that, with the old Bundesrepublik, the Green party also faded away, at least at the national level...
...In personal appearance and political style the Eastern dissidents and the Western Greens have been remarkably similar...
...The new grand issue is what all previous political conflicts could take for granted: the definition of membership in the nation-state.* For this new issue the Greens are uniquely unprepared...
...the journalists Cora Stephan and Klaus Hartung...
...The party program of 1990 calls for a "world without military blocs and a society without weapons and armies," which translates into concrete demands to abolish the German army and withdraw from NATO...
...Domestically, economic growth and social peace allowed the green topics of ecology, risk, and participation to become key public policy issues of the day...
...SPRING • 1994 • 237 Green Politics democracy" completely dismisses the reality of bounded, national citizenship...
...Sensitive Realo Greens like Fischer are well aware that unchecked professionalization would turn the Greens into a party just like any other, thereby threatening their very soul...
...But in ceding the terrain of national discourse completely to the resurgent political right, the Greens and their intellectual allies have unwittingly contributed to the current polarization of the political landscape in Germany...
...Moreover, the Eastern distaste for the "leftist" Western Greens appears strange, if one considers that the quixotic quest for "true socialism" had energized the Eastern dissident movement as late as 1989...
...The expected coalition with the Social Democrats after the federal elections of 1994 now looks less likely...
...In this regard, the fusion between Alliance 90 and the Greens offers a positive contrast to West Germany's nearly Anschluss-like annexation of East Germany...
...In a curious anomaly, in Eastern Europe the Western quest for the "great peace" was also widely shared in East German dissident circles...
...Tellingly, the first organized opposition movement in East Germany had viewed itself as a "peace movement," not a "human rights movement...
...To the majority of the Greens and their supporters, the most important lesson of German history is captured by the first demand...
...We are talking about the weather...
...But the Greens' greatest legacy has been in environmental policy...
...Nineteen elections on the local, state, federal, and European levels mark 1994 as the "super-election year" in Germany...
...Yet to an increasingly vocal minority...
...Outlook The reaffirmation of Green pacifism represents a serious setback for the Greens...
...The need for military action to counteract massive human rights violations and genocide is not likely to be wished away by any ritualistic commitment to peace...
...While the self-styled "anti-party party" found its identity in all-out opposition to the established forces and institutions of the Bonn republic, it was also a distinctive creation of that regime...
...Despite the ongoing tendencies toward economic globalization and political supranationalization, we still live in a world of bounded citizenries, in which the political unit is the nation...
...The conflict between bellicists and pacifists has led to interesting new coalitions on both sides...
...The Green disaffection with all that is national truthfully reflects their federal republican origins, where the legacy of National Socialism had thoroughly discredited a positive national identity...
...During the Gulf War, leading Greens, such as Petra Kelly, Gerd Bastian, and Joschka Fischer, attacked the "naive pacifism" of the peace movement...
...Yet a paradoxical party declaration indicated that the new conflict cannot be willed away by simple fiat: "The most important consequence of German history for us is: Never again war...
...1110 be sure, the Eastern qualms with the Western peace discourse have their own hypocrisy...
...This proposal conspicuously avoids the notion of "German" and defines "the people" (das Volk), from which sovereignty is to originate, as "the totality of all citizens" without any reference to "Germans...
...The Bonn convention also upheld the perennial Green demands to have Germany exit from NATO and abolish its Bundeswehr...
...The bellicist camp, in turn, represented mainly by a surprising coalition of West German women activists and East German dissidents, demands that it is "high time to reintroduce the category of morality into politics...
...Coping With the Nation A third challenge arising out of 1989 concerns the problem of nationhood...
...They chided the latter for flexing its notorious anti-American muscle— "No Blood for Oil" — while completely ignoring Iraq's threat to annihilate Israel...
...In addition, the Alliance is entitled to keep its trademark name of "citizen movement" (Burgerbewegung), which comes with a veto right in the Landerrat, the Greens' state-based steering committee...
...Moreover, leading German intellectuals with known left-wing and Green sympathies, such as Jiirgen Habermas...
...Obviously, these implications are contradictory...
...the political scientist Claus Leggewie...
...Why had this fusion, despite its compelling programmatic and electoral logic, been so difficult to achieve...
...But the complete refusal by the Greens to draw any kind of boundary avoids the task altogether...
...Now that the Realos have won the struggle over the profile of the Greens, balancing the seemingly irrecon cilable requirements of efficiency and legitimacy will continue to preoccupy the party...
...In Joschka Fischer, the chubby and witty ex-anarchist and Realo leader, the Greens may possess the greatest political talent in Germany since Bavarian hardliner Franz Joseph Strauss...
...Joschka Fischer, the head of the prevailing Realo faction, had always demanded that the Greens must become a party that "seeks to govern this country, from the local to the federal level...
...The Greens' difficulties with the new issue of boundary drawing and national membership have become apparent in the recent debate about asylum and immigration...
...The Green election slogan of 1990 indicates how oddly out of tune the party was with the dramatic reshuffling of the political agenda that was brought about by national unification: "Everyone is talking about Germany...
...For both, it was the New Left's pinnacle year of 1968—student protest in the West and the Prague Spring in the East—that constituted their formative experience...
...The latter in turn accused the Easterners of being "too conformist," "too moderate," "too rightist...
...and the poet and balladier Wolf Biermann supported the Allied effort in the Gulf War...
...The Greens' reflexlike anti-NATO stance is particularly ironic, given that the postcommunist nations of East-Central Europe are now lining up to join the devilish alliance...
...In successive waves of party defections, the ecosocialist faction around ex-Maoists Rainer Trampert and Thomas Ebermann left the Greens in 1990, followed by the exodus of the radical ecology faction around Jutta Ditfurth one year later...
...This same mentality is apparent in the Green proposal for a new German Constitution, which was jointly drafted with representatives of the East German dissident movement...
...The Greens found their political identity in addressing the negative side effects of economic growth, and in criticizing a producer-oriented, corporatist style of decision making that excluded environmental concerns, the interests of consumers, and those of women...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
