Postwar

As the economy slowed and the emancipation of women gathered pace, the demography of Europe was changing—with ominous implications for the welfare state in years to come. The social changes wrought by the women’s movement were not, however, mirrored in politics itself. No ‘women’s party’ emerged, capable of si- phoning off votes and getting its representatives elected. Women remained a minority in national legislatures and governments.

The Left proved generally more open to electing women than the Right (but not everywhere—in both Belgium and France, Christian parties of the Center-Right were for many years more likely than their Socialist opponents to nominate women to safe constituencies), but the best predictor of women’s prospects in public life was not ideology but geography. Between 1975 and 1990 the number of women in Finland’s parliament rose from 23 percent to 39 percent; in Sweden from 21 percent to 38 percent; in Norway from 16 percent to 36 percent; and in Denmark from 16 percent to 33 percent. Farther south, in the parliaments of Italy and Portugal, women constituted just one in twelve of parliamentary deputies in 1990. In the UK House of Commons they were just 7 percent of the total; in France’s Assemblee Nationale, a mere 6 percent.

Environmentalists, men and women alike, had considerably more success in translating their sentiments into electoral politics. At one level ‘environmentalism’ (a neologism dating from the Thirties) was indeed a new departure: the collective expression of middle-class fears about nuclear power stations and galloping urbanization, motorways and pollution. But the Green Movement in Europe would never have been so effective had it been just a footnote to the Sixties: well-heeled weekend Luddites in stone-washed natural fibres triangulating between their instincts and their interests. The longing for a more ‘natural’ world and the search for a personal politics of ‘authenticity’ had deep roots on both sides of the ideological divide, traceable to the Romantics and their horror at the depredations of early industrialism. By the early twentieth century both Left and Right had their cycling clubs, vegetarian restaurants, Wandervogel movements and ramblers, affiliated variously to socialist or nationalist dreams of emancipation and return.

The German nostalgia for uniquely German landscapes, for the mountains and rivers of the Harz and the Pfalz, for Heimat; the French nationalist dream of peasant harmony in la France profonde, unsullied by cities and cosmopolitanism; the English reverie of a once and future country harmony, Blake’s lost Jerusalem: these had more in common than any of their followers might have felt comfortable admitting. And whereas the Left had for many decades watched in admiration as Communist ‘output’ strove to outstrip that of the West, by the Seventies voices on Right and Left alike were starting to express some unease at the collateral costs of progress, productivity and ‘modernity’.[211]

The modern environmentalist revolution thus benefited twice over: it was a break from the callous nostrums of the recent past—and it had roots in a more distant history, unremembered but atavistically reassuring. Environmentalism (like pacifism) often aroused in its wake a revival of nationalism—or regionalism—but with a human face. The ‘Alternativen’ of West Berlin, or the anti-nuclear protesters of Austria who won a 1978 referendum forbidding their government from activating the nuclear power station at Zwentendorf, would never have identified themselves as nationalists or even patriots. But their anger against the pollution of the local environment above all (and their relative indifference to similar havoc being wreaked elsewhere) suggests otherwise. The ‘not in my backyard’ quality of the incipient Green Movement harked back to an earlier model.

There was thus nothing contradictory in the enthusiasm with which Portugal’s ageing dictator Antonio Salazar enforced the same environmental controls being urged upon their democratic governments by post-’68 radicals in Vienna or Amsterdam. Distrustful of ‘materialism’ and determined to keep the twentieth century at bay, Salazar was, in his way, a genuine enthusiast for ecological objectives—attained in his case by the simple expedient of maintaining his fellow countrymen in a condition of unparalleled economic torpor. He would certainly have approved of the achievement of the French protesters who in 1971 blocked a planned military base at Larzac, on the high plains of south-central France.

The symbolism of Larzac—where uninhabited grasslands were defended against the massed power of the French state by an insurgent regiment of environmentalists—was immense, and not just in France: an emotional victory had been secured less for the indigenous sheep of the Massif uplands than for their distinctly un-local shepherds, many of them young radicals who had only recently left Paris or Lyon to recycle themselves as farmers on the wilder shores of ‘deep France’. The battlefront had decidedly shifted—at least in Western Europe.

In Eastern Europe, of course, the doctrine of unrestricted primary production—and the absence of any official countervailing voices—left the environment at the mercy of official polluters of every sort. Whereas Austria might be constrained by internal opposition to abandon nuclear power, her Communist neighbors had no such compunction about building nuclear reactors in Czechoslovakia, planning massive dams just downstream along the Danube, in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, or steadily increasing output and air pollution a few dozen miles north in Nowa Huta, Poland’s ‘purpose-built’ steel town. But for all that, the moral and human costs of rampant industrial pollution and environmental degradation had not passed unnoticed in the Eastern bloc.

Thus the cynical indifference of the post-’68 Husak regime in Prague—its willingness to wreak havoc along the common Danube frontier in pursuit of domestically generated kilowatts—triggered a rising backlash among otherwise politically quiescent Hungarians. Implausible as it would have seemed in earlier days, the proposed Gabcikovo-Nagymaros dam was to become a significant source of domestic opposition to the Budapest regime itself—as well as a major embarrassment to relations between the two ‘fraternal’ neighbors.[212]

In Czechoslovakia, an older distaste for technological modernity had passed to a new generation of intellectuals via the writings of the philosophers Jan Patocka and Vaclav Belohradsky especially; the latter working from exile in Italy after 1970, his neo-Heideggerian musings read in samizdat back in his country of origin. The idea that the effort to subdue and dominate nature to human ends—the project of the Enlightenment—might come at too high a price was already familiar to readers on both sides of the Cold War divide through the writings of the Frankfurt School, notably Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment , published in 1944. With a Heideggerian twist—the suggestion that Communism itself was an illicit Western import, touched with the hubristic illusion of endless material progress—these ruminations formed the basis of an intellectualopposition that would surface in the Seventies, combining ethical dissent with ecological critiques, and led by Patocka and one of Belohradsky’s most enthusiastic readers, the playwright Vaclav Havel.[213]

In time, a common environmentalist critique would serve as a bridge between new forms of protest in East and West. But in the circumstances of the early Seventies neither side yet knew—nor in the Western case cared —much about the views or problems of their counterparts across the Iron Curtain. The west European environmentalists especially were far too busy building their local political constituency to pay attention to international politics, except in so far as these affected the unique object of their attentions. In this, however, they were singularly successful.

It was in 1973 that the first ‘ecology’ candidates stood in local elections in France and Britain—the same year that saw the founding Bauern (farmers’) Congress in West Germany, forerunner to the Greens. Fuelled by the first oil crisis, the West German environmental movement moved rapidly into the political mainstream. From sit- ins, protest marches and citizens’ initiatives at the start of the decade, the Greens—variously backed by farmers, environmentalists, pacifists and urban squatters—had progressed by 1979 to the point of securing their own representation in the parliaments of two of the German Lander. Four years later, in the wake of the second oil shock, their support at the Federal elections of 1983 increased from 568,000 to 2,165,000 (5.6 percent of the vote) and won them parliamentary representation (twenty-seven seats) for the first time. By 1985 the Greens were in a major regional government, ruling Hesse in coalition with the SPD (and with the young Green politician Joschka Fischer as Hesse’s Minister for environment and energy).

The German Greens’ success was not immediately repeated elsewhere, although in time the Austrian and especially the French parties would do quite respectably. West Germans were perhaps unusual. In these years they were growing averse to the very sources of their own post-war revival: between 1966 and 1981 the share of the population that looked favorably upon ‘technology’ and its achievements fell precipitately, from 72 percent to 30 percent. The West German Greens also benefited from the German system of proportional representation, whereby even quite small parties could make their way into the regional and Federal parliaments—although a