Green parties were formed in response to a particular global challenge, that of environmental crisis. But how do these allegedly ‘post-materialist’ parties respond to a worldwide economic downturn? Via the work of Stuart Hall and Antonio Gramsci, I analyse the ‘Green New Deal’ as formulated by the Green parties of Germany, England and Wales, and France. While the three parties partly draw on a common ‘Green’ or ‘ecologist’ vocabulary, they are in fact promoting three different, even competing, economic and political hegemonic projects, and I demonstrate that these projects rest on quite distinct interpretations of the financial crisis. The German Greens urge a greater degree of global financial regulation, implying that the crisis might have been avoided through such measures. The British party adopts what one might term a classically social democratic approach, emphasising that the crisis cannot be explained merely within the sphere of the financial but is a result of ‘the ideology of privatisation and liberalisation’ in the global economy more broadly. The French party goes further still, claiming that the crisis explodes the boundaries of orthodox economic explanations – liberal and Keynesian alike – and veils its socialist policies in a thick ‘ecologist’ vocabulary, referring to ‘the first socio-ecological crisis of capitalism’. Having shown this, and through conceiving of ideas as inherently relational and prone to contradiction, my paper concludes that while there is a certain novelty to the proposed solutions to economic recession, and while there are some commonalities to the projects suggested by the three parties, ‘Green economics’ is always and everywhere laden with other ideational inflections; and, therefore, there is not one specifically ‘Green’ solution which can lead us out of situations of financial crisis.
Keywords: Green parties; Financial crisis; Green economics; Antonio Gramsci.
