Beyond Europeanization: Political Ecology, Environmentalism and Greens in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

Much of the past work in political science on political environmentalism in Central and Eastern Europe has been conducted through the prism of Europeanization and ‘transitology’, as the historian Philipp Ther recently called it (Ther, 2016). It reads as an evaluation of the path to EU membership, dealing with its effects and affects, expectations being met or not, the role of movements and NGOs in this regard, their capacities and resources, (mal)practices of EU institutions and their influence, the degree of 'compliance' with the EU acquis, etc. The contemporary outlook is remarkably different. The path to EU-membership is no longer topical, and the transformative power of ‘Europe’ is no longer the dominant determinant of environmental policy and governance. The economic crisis of 2008-09 has hit the region hard, and worked to undermine former certitudes regarding liberal institutions and democratic stability, enthralling the rise of a virulent right-wing-populism and the instalment of explicit illiberal governments. For better or for worse, the projection of a green future, as a consequence of transition to liberal democracy, has lost whatever remained of its former self-evidence (cf. Bernstein, 2002). To this backdrop, we believe that the study of political environmentalism in the region provides crucial lessons of a more general nature. Indeed, the developments in CEE provide us with some of the earliest and ferocious cases of what is seen by many as a general crisis of liberalism (Manent 2014). We urgently need to identify new domestic and global factors in this regard. Although EU environmental standards and policy remain as normative benchmarks, post-accession domestic politics is now the more critical constraint on the institutionalisation, implementation and development of green agendas. Whilst the new member states are not outliers in terms of compliance, Brexit will inevitably distract the EU for a considerable period of time and it is thus unlikely that progressive environmental agendas will be pursued with any vigour by the Commission in the coming years. This, in our view, demands a ‘domestic turn’ in [our understanding of] green politics in the CEE states. What it also calls for is a return to the question of whether it is, or ever was, appropriate to frame our understanding of environmentalism in Central and Eastern Europe in terms emerging from past Western trajectories. Overall, from various perspectives, each of the contributions to this panel will contend that what is now vital is to revisit some of the early analysis of green agendas that emerged out of the implosion of state socialism, in order to re-discover forms of (radical) environmental politics that challenge “NGOization” and Europeanization under its current premises (Jacobsson and Saxonberg, 2013), and frame the contemporary mobilizations and politics from a broader historical and/or political economical perspective. The contributors each cast the early 1990s debate about post-socialist particularism versus a “return to Europe” on to the present: what remains specific about the environmental politics of these countries, and to what extent are their legacies of state socialism generalizable on a grander scale?