Building a Sustainable Life-World: A Reconstruction of Sustainable Republicanism in Action

The connection between a republican conception of politics and the necessity to overcome a non-sustainable lifestyle can be made in two ways. On the one hand, there is overwhelming evidence that a liberal framework which emphasizes the individual freedom of citizens and encourages them to follow their personal benefit, needs to be replaced by a republican conception which is based on a more complex conception of freedom, be it freedom as non-domination or “social freedom”. On the other hand, sustainability presupposes not only a republican political culture, but, once it is established as a policy goal, seems to render republican settings and framings more probable. It is this second argument, namely the idea that if we take sustainability seriously we will almost inevitably end up in a more republican political setting, that I would like to illustrate by taking a closer look at political developments in the region of Baden-Württemberg. This region, which is roughly the size of Hungary and is a powerhouse of the German economy, is ruled by the Green Party and is currently undergoing a major transformation. With respect to Baden Württemberg, I would like to examine how changing policy goals and their implementation have had an impact on the way citizens view the polity, in particular, their ideas about the limits and purposes of the State and the importance of political participation. I would like to prove possibility of republican sustainability by referring to the reality of a transformation already taking place. The case of Baden-Württemberg shows, I argue, that sustainability as a policy goal has an impact on the polity in which it is implemented: It forces citizens into participation and makes the question of the common good inevitable.