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July, 1991
The European Community, Eastern Europe, and the European Greens
Michael Feinstein, international working group of the GCoC
Appearing in Green Synthesis
July, 1991
In December, 1989 Green Committees of Correspondence (GCoC) members
Ross Mirkarimi (San Francisco Greens) and Mindy Lorenz (Santa
Clara River Greens) formally broke the ice with our European Green
friends by representing the International Working Group of the
GCoC for the first time at a meeting of the (then) 21-nation European Greens coordination in Brussels.
In the summer of ‘90 I followed their footsteps with a six-week
tour that included representing the GCoC at the June European
Greens coordination meeting in Brussels, the Swedish Green National
Congress, the meeting of European Green Parliamentarians at the
European Parliament in Strasbourg, France and visiting Green Parties
in 12 countries East and West. In October I returned again, this
time to Bonn, to attend another meeting of the European Greens
coordination. Since then I’ve put together a 450-page book on
the trip, entitled Six Weeks With European Greens: interviews, impressions, platforms,
and personalities, that is now available. The book deals with issues like movement/party,
East Greens/West Greens, German reunification, platforms, party
structures, and more. But the one I focus on in this article is
the European Community, Eastern Europe and the political reformulation
of Europe.
In early 1990 there was cautious optimism on the part of European
Greens. Forty years of bloc structures were coming to an end,
repressive east European regimes were evolving into democracies,
and the environmental and economic devastation in the East was
being revealed. Greens in East and West Europe hoped that a new
“third way” could evolve beyond capitalism and state socialism,
that would promote democracy, ecology, and socially-just economies.
What the Greens see evolving instead is Western European power
that is potentially exploitative and anti-ecological, centralized
and undemocratic, and militaristic and colonial -- together the
worst of the world view that produced both the cold War and the
Greenhouse Effect. That power is the 12-nation European Community
(EC).
EC President Jaques Delors states that the long term goal of the
EC is to create an economic, monetary, and political (read military)
superstate, capable of competing with the U.S. and Japan. Towards
that end the EC plans to complete its economic union in 1992.
The European Greens fear that this union will usher in an economic
era of potentially unbridled transnational corporate freedom from
environmental and even domestic political control. The rush within
the EC countries for economic hegemony will in addition, the Greens
argue, overwhelm local, regional, and national sovereignty in
Western Europe and by virtue of its combined economic power, to
determine the political destiny of the east as well.
The goal of the EC economic union is to form a free and unrestricted
internal market that can both 1) provide reasonably equal opportunities
and benefits to all its members and 2) create a single trading
block capable of competing with the U.S. and Japan in world markets.
But as Sara Parkin, U.K. Green Party speaker argues, the Greens
believe that the demands of international economics and world
trade will overwhelm the needs of Western Europeans for a fair
internal market based on social justice and a healthy environment.
Is this criticism valid?
In order to form a “free and unrestricted” internal market, EC
countries must harmonize their laws regarding commerce. Whereas
in the U.S. we partially define our political union by the Bill
of Rights, the EC defines its economic union by what are ironically
called the “four freedoms” -- the free movements of goods, services,
labor, and capital. Together these “freedoms” define free trade,
such that if environmental, labor, or safety standards are so
high in one country that they prevent penetration into their domestic
market of a product or service of another, those standards will
be understood as obstructing free trade and be therefore illegal.
The practical effect of this rule has been to mediocratize conditions,
so that low environmental standards in countries like Greece,
Italy and Portugal may be raised, but high standards in Denmark,
Holland, and West Germany must in turn be compromised.
The problem with this formulation, as Swedish Green Party founder
and parliamentarian Per Gahrton argues, is not simply that a union
formed primarily on economic principles will compromise today’s
environmental, health and labor standards. In addition, the EC
formulation will inhibit the creative and flexible potential inherent
in a pluralistic political process. For example, if the EC formula
were applied to the U.S., California could not enforce its high
auto emission standards because they would exclude from California
most of the cars produced in the U.S. This would not only be bad
for California standards are recognized world-wide, this approach
would prevent the world community from benefiting from its own
diversity.
The Greens argue that with the dawning of the Age of the Greenhouse
Effect, the EC formulation will be leading Europeans even further
away from an ecologically sustainable society. They cite as example
the EC’s own Task Force Report on the Environment and the Internal
Market. It suggest that as a result of economic harmonization,
transborder car and truck transport within the EC will go up 30-50%
over and above what it would have given otherwise projected economic
growth. Although better technology will be implemented, sulphur
dioxide and nitrous dioxide emissions are still expected to rise
8-9% and 12-14% respectively.
This same report suggests that as a result of freeing the movements
of capital and labor and removing restrictions on land acquisition,
transnational control will increase significantly in industries
such as farming, fishing and forestry. Already the EC agricultural
policy favors some of the worst elements of agribusiness. According
to Walter Turnowsky, Danish Green International Secretary, over
70% of agrisubsidies go to pesticide and surplus food storage
companies and not to the farmers they’re meant to protect. Ironically,
the EC is currently demanding that Eastern European nations eliminate
agricultural subsidies so that the “free forces of the market”
can be allowed to operate there.
It is in the power structure of the EC itself, however, that Greens
warn it is most problematic. Although the European Parliament
is an elected representative body, it has no meaningful legislative
power. The decision-making ability in the EC rests instead with
a council of ministers, who are appointed by their national governments
rather than being elected directly by the people. The parliamentarians
who do this appointing are themselves elected one person per 15,000+
voters. Then they abdicate this representation to this small group
of ministers.
That this process is top-down and antithetical to real democracy
is acknowledged even by EC supporters, who call it the “democratic
deficit.” The EC top is a very small elite who, reminiscent of
the worst centralization of the Kremlin, are not even accountable
by the diffuse umbilicability of the modern representative democratic
nation-state.
If decision-making power has been wrestled from the citizens of
the EC, it is nothing like how EC policy could affect Eastern
Europe. Although there are 34 nations in Europe (there may be
50 with the potentially independent Baltic states and other independent
republics in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia),
only 12 are in the EC. Yet these 12 (along with Sweden, Austria,
and Switzerland, who have their own economic ties to the EC) hold
most of the economic purse strings. So if countries in the East
are to receive aid to feed their citizens and rehabilitate their
failed infrastructures, they have to come to the EC. But the EC
will not have them, not this year, not in 20 years, unless and
until Eastern countries do certain things like adopt market economies
and achieve certain levels of economic growth, the same kind of
growth that is already depleting the Earth in a destructive and
unsustainable manner.
The EC policy would deprive Eastern Nations of the ability to
seek their own path. But even if and when they adopted the Western
growth model, they are still not guaranteed success. As Eastern
countries open up to international market forces, Western capital
is penetrating and colonizing their economies. This is recreating
the familiar North-South dynamic of capital and resource exploitation.
Instead of promoting regional self-reliance, Western capital is
drawing the East into the world economy as a source for cheap
labor, a destination point for hazardous waste (in exchange for
hard currency), and as a dumping place for inferior products and
technology. Add to that the burden of foreign debt and years of
dependence, not independence, seem probable.
Compounding this scenario further is that the Western growth model
itself can’t be repeated because it is dependent upon human and
environmental exploitation by the very few over the very many.
It is simply not possible for another couple of hundred million
in the East to repeat the consumptive and wasteful patterns of
the West.
As frustrations rise in the East over dashed expectations, more
and more will seek financial salvation in the West. Nationalistic
resentment there, however, is already on the rise and as waves
of Poles, Romanians, Czechs, (and soon the Russians) continue
to pour in, the social consequences will be painfully unpleasant.
Do the Greens have an alternative? Yes -- a “Europe of Regions”
incorporating principles U.S. Greens are familiar with: ecology,
social justice, decentralization, grass-roots democracy, and local
self-reliance. The EuroGreens favor supra-national, pan-European
coordination on security, human rights and the environment. But
other political question which today the EC is subsuming for itself,
Greens feel should begin with local and regional political units
representative of both bioregional and cultural diversity. The
metaphor used around Europe is “The Common House of Europe”. Greens
feel there should be many rooms in that house, small and open
to all who want to live there, including those from Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union. On the macro-level, all of these rooms must
have a voice in the operation of the house.
Is this realistic? The Greens’ hope is to give inertial life to
their vision by empowering existing structures to counterbalance
the EC. Currently they feel the Conference for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (CSCE) (more well-known as the Helsinki II process)
holds the greatest promise. The CSCE already contains all 34 European
nations and it meets periodically on security issues. If this
body could be given more authority, it could evolve towards the
Common House the Greens desire. Another body, the Council of Europe,
contains 23 nations and meets on human rights. In his May 1990
address to the European Parliament, Vaclav Havel proposed that
the Council and the CSCE merge.
But if the Greens are to articulate their vision effectively,
they must overcome the mindset of the times. The average voter
may identify with the Greens’ environmental concern, but not understand
the Green critique of capitalism, democracy and the EC. West Germany’s
Helmut Kohl pushed through German unification by appealing to
simple ideas that the people wanted to hear. With increasingly
hard economic times, the EC is sold to the average citizen as
prosperity through increased “free trade” -- who can argue with
that -- wasn’t it the lack of free trade that made it so bad in
Eastern Europe?
On June 1st and 2nd, the European Greens hold their Europe-wide
Congress in Zurich, Switzerland. One of their main goals is to
further articulate their vision of a “Europe of Regions”. How
well they do so will be learned this fall, with parliamentary
elections in Sweden, Belgium and several other countries.