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Politicisation of ecology: new perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe

Europe (Central and Eastern)
Democracy
Environmental Policy
Green Politics
Political Methodology
Political Theory
Social Movements
Post-Structuralism
Pepijn van Eeden
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Pepijn van Eeden
Université Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract

This article occupies itself with an almost forgotten subject: the rise and fall of political ecology in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In contrast to Western Europe, environmental issues in CEE politicized as symbolizing the moral bankruptcy of state socialism rather than Western European consumerism. Certainly after the Chernobyl-accident, ecology started to play an important role in the wave of protests that signalled the end of the communist experiment in 1989 (Rupnik 1990; Pavlínek and Pickles, 2000; Kenney 2001; 2002;). At the start of the 1990s, therefore, political ecology seemed to have a bright future in the region. However, in a few years’ time, all green parties founded in 1989/1990 had virtually disappeared. The movements themselves professionalized, became grant-dependent, and depoliticized. CEE political elites, for their part, had gradually become disinterested if not outright hostile to green ideas by the turn of the millennium. This paper investigates this process with reference to the concept of ‘the political’ as conceived by Carl Schmitt (1931/1964) and Chantal Mouffe (1985; 2000; 2005). We rely further on Actor-Network-Theory and the work of Latour (2004; 2014) in what emerges as our Schmittian-Latourian lens. Its most important characterics: a ‘post-foundational’ notion of the political and an effective reappropriation of the radical empiricism usually claimed by ‘hard’ currents in social science (cf. Latour 2005, p. 109-115). In a second section we zoom in on two key actors from Poland and Romania respectively. Both first developed their engagement with ecology during state socialism, became leaders of green parties shortly after 1989, and then served as Ministers of Environment before their parties imploded. From their narrated experience we trace the emergence of ecology in the ‘hard’ scientific domain under state socialism, its politicization when socialist certainties crumbled in the 1980s, and its depoliticization when consensus arose over free market foundations after 1989. These findings are then confronted to two academic narratives on the relative non-politicality of the CEE environment. The first follows the developmental/transitional scheme and assumes CEE is ‘not yet ready’: it has not yet reached the stage of ‘advanced industrial society’ and its ‘postmaterial values’ (Inglehart, 1990; Rüdig, 2003; 2006; Rüdig and Rihoux, 2006; Frankland, 1995; 2014; 2016). A second trait in the literature draws on postcolonial studies and takes an opposite point of departure, pointing to transitional US and EU funding schemes, persistent Cold War mythologies, and an ‘imagined West’ as marginalising and depoliticising local ecology movements (Jancar-Webster, 1998; Fagan, 2004; Jehlička and Carmin, 2005; Gille, 2007; Flam, 2011; Jacobsson, 2015; Szulecki, 2015; Jehlička et al., 2015). Although we associate most closely with the second approach, it turns out that both narratives produce incoherencies when confronted to the empirical-experiential accounts of our actors. We return to the Schmittian-Latourian lens for a fresh understanding of de/politicization of ecology in CEE: neither impossibilised by ‘neo-imperialism’ nor dependent on positive economic circumstances, but resulting from the degree to which ‘established truths’ are in place to shortcut the experiential, environmental and political.