There was thus nothing contradictory in the enthusiasm with which Portugal’s ageing dictator António Salazar enforced the same environmental controls being urged upon their democratic governments by post-’68 radicals in Vienna or Amsterdam. Distrustful of ‘materialism’ and determined to keep the twentieth century at bay, Salazar was, in his way, a genuine enthusiast for ecological objectives—attained in his case by the simple expedient of maintaining his fellow countrymen in a condition of unparalleled economic torpor. He would certainly have approved of the achievement of the French protesters who in 1971 blocked a planned military base at Larzac, on the high plains of south-central France.
The symbolism of Larzac—where uninhabited grasslands were defended against the massed power of the French state by an insurgent regiment of environmentalists—was immense, and not just in France: an emotional victory had been secured less for the indigenous sheep of the Massif uplands than for their distinctly un-local shepherds, many of them young radicals who had only recently left Paris or Lyon to recycle themselves as farmers on the wilder shores of ‘deep France’. The battlefront had decidedly shifted—at least in Western Europe.
In Eastern Europe, of course, the doctrine of unrestricted primary production—and the absence of any official countervailing voices—left the environment at the mercy of official polluters of every sort. Whereas Austria might be constrained by internal opposition to abandon nuclear power, her Communist neighbors had no such compunction about building nuclear reactors in Czechoslovakia, planning massive dams just downstream along the Danube, in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, or steadily increasing output and air pollution a few dozen miles north in Nowa Huta, Poland’s ‘purpose-built’ steel town. But for all that, the moral and human costs of rampant industrial pollution and environmental degradation had not passed unnoticed in the Eastern bloc.
Thus the cynical indifference of the post-’68 Husák regime in Prague—its willingness to wreak havoc along the common Danube frontier in pursuit of domestically generated kilowatts—triggered a rising backlash among otherwise politically quiescent Hungarians. Implausible as it would have seemed in earlier days, the proposed Gabčikovo-Nagymaros dam was to become a significant source of domestic opposition to the Budapest regime itself—as well as a major embarrassment to relations between the two ‘fraternal’ neighbors.
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In Czechoslovakia, an older distaste for technological modernity had passed to a new generation of intellectuals via the writings of the philosophers Jan Patočka and Václav Bělohradský especially; the latter working from exile in Italy after 1970, his neo-Heideggerian musings read in
samizdat
back in his country of origin. The idea that the effort to subdue and dominate nature to human ends—the project of the Enlightenment—might come at too high a price was already familiar to readers on both sides of the Cold War divide through the writings of the Frankfurt School, notably Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their
Dialectic of Enlightenment
, published in 1944. With a Heideggerian twist—the suggestion that Communism itself was an illicit Western import, touched with the hubristic illusion of endless material progress—these ruminations formed the basis of an intellectualopposition that would surface in the Seventies, combining ethical dissent with ecological critiques, and led by Patočka and one of Bělohradský’s most enthusiastic readers, the playwright Václav Havel.
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In time, a common environmentalist critique would serve as a bridge between new forms of protest in East and West. But in the circumstances of the early Seventies neither side yet knew—nor in the Western case cared—much about the views or problems of their counterparts across the Iron Curtain. The west European environmentalists especially were far too busy building their local political constituency to pay attention to international politics, except in so far as these affected the unique object of their attentions. In this, however, they were singularly successful.
It was in 1973 that the first ‘ecology’ candidates stood in local elections in France and Britain—the same year that saw the founding Bauern (farmers’) Congress in West Germany, forerunner to the Greens. Fuelled by the first oil crisis, the West German environmental movement moved rapidly into the political mainstream. From sit-ins, protest marches and citizens’ initiatives at the start of the decade, the Greens—variously backed by farmers, environmentalists, pacifists and urban squatters—had progressed by 1979 to the point of securing their own representation in the parliaments of two of the German
Länder
. Four years later, in the wake of the second oil shock, their support at the Federal elections of 1983 increased from 568,000 to 2,165,000 (5.6 percent of the vote) and won them parliamentary representation (twenty-seven seats) for the first time. By 1985 the Greens were in a major regional government, ruling Hesse in coalition with the SPD (and with the young Green politician Joschka Fischer as Hesse’s Minister for environment and energy).
The German Greens’ success was not immediately repeated elsewhere, although in time the Austrian and especially the French parties would do quite respectably. West Germans were perhaps unusual. In these years they were growing averse to the very sources of their own post-war revival: between 1966 and 1981 the share of the population that looked favorably upon ‘technology’ and its achievements fell precipitately, from 72 percent to 30 percent. The West German Greens also benefited from the German system of proportional representation, whereby even quite small parties could make their way into the regional and Federal parliaments—although a roughly comparable system in Italy did little for environmentalists there: by 1987 the Italian ‘Greens’ had secured less than a million votes and just 13 seats out of 630. In Belgium the two ecological parties (one French-speaking, one Flemish) also improved steadily: from 4.8 percent of the vote at their first appearance in 1981 they rose steadily, passing 7.1 percent in 1987. In Britain, however, the voting system was designed to disadvantage small or fringe parties and did just that.
In Scandinavia, the prospects for single-issue parties like environmentalists (or pacifists, or feminists) were restricted by the ecumenical range of the existing political groupings—why ‘waste’ a vote on the Greens when Social Democrats, or Agrarian Parties, purported to share similar concerns? Environmentalism in Norway, for example, was at least as widely embraced as in Germany—as early as 1970 the Labour government’s plans to exploit Northern Europe’s largest waterfall, at Mardola in the Arctic Circle, for hydro-electric power provoked widespread national outrage and prompted the emergence of environmental politics in Norway. But neither the Mardola affair nor subsequent protests at the prospect of nuclear power stations ever translated into a separate political movement: protests—and compromises—were negotiated within the governing majority.
Greens did a little better in Sweden, where they finally entered Parliament in 1988; and in Finland, where individual environmentalists first won election in 1987 and only then formed the Green Association, an environmental party, the following year (not surprisingly, perhaps, the Finnish Greens did far better in the prosperous, urban, ‘yuppie’ south of the country than in the poorer, rural center and north). But Finland and Sweden were unusual: pacifists, feminists, environmentalists, the handicapped and other single-issue activists were so sure of a generally sympathetic cultural environment for their concerns that they could afford to split from the mainstream and risk dividing their own supporters without jeopardizing either the governing majority or the prospects for their own agenda.
Single-issue parties, as we have seen, often emerged in the wake of a crisis, a scandal or an unpopular proposal: thus Austria’s environmentalists, to the extent that they became a national force, owed their rise to bitter confrontation with the authorities over a 1984 proposal to build a hydro-electric plant in a wetland forest at Hainburg in eastern Austria. The Green cause received a strong boost from the ensuing confrontation between the Socialist-led coalition government and environmental activists: and even though the government subsequently backed down, the incident led to a sharp increase in support for the Greens from disillusioned Socialist voters, notably among intellectuals and liberal professionals.
The proliferation of single-issue parties and programs, and their steady absorption into mainstream public life, took its toll upon the traditional organizations of the Left in particular. Communist parties in Western Europe, undermined by the steady erosion of their proletarian constituency and discredited by the invasion of Czechoslovakia, were most vulnerable. The French Communist Party was led by semi-unreconstructed Stalinists who had never really taken their distance from the events of 1956, much less those of 1968. Inherently conservative and suspicious of any issue or person it could not subordinate and control, the Party saw its share of the vote fall steadily at every election: from a post-war peak of 28 percent in 1946 to 18.6 percent in 1977 and thence, in a vertiginous collapse, to under 10 percent in the elections of the 1980s.
The Italian Communists did rather better. Where the French Communist hierarchy was almost universally mediocre and unattractive—reflecting in this, as almost everything else, the PCF’s slavish imitation of the Soviet example—the PCI, from Palmiro Togliatti to Enrico Berlinguer (Party Secretary from 1972 until his early death, at the age of 62, in 1984), was blessed with intelligent and even appealing leaders. Both parties, like every other Communist organization, were deeply dependent on Soviet funding: between 1971 and 1990 Soviet agencies channeled $50 million to the French Communists, $47 million to the Italians.
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But the Italians did at least express public disapproval for egregious Soviet actions—notably the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The (relative) autonomy of the Italian Communists was complemented by Berlinguer’s 1973 decision to commit his party to the defense of Italian democracy, even if it meant abandoning its outright opposition to the Christian Democrats: this was the so-called ‘historic compromise’. This shift was driven in part by the shock of the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, which convinced Berlinguer and other Communist intellectuals that even if the Communists won a parliamentary majority they would never be allowed—by the Americans, or their allies in Italian military, business and Church circles—to form a government of their own. But it was also a reaction, as we saw in the previous chapter, to the very real threat to Italian democracy itself from Right and Left terrorists for whom the Communist Party was as much the enemy as the Italian state.
These changes brought temporary electoral dividends. The Communist electorate in Italy grew steadily—from 6.7 million votes at the elections of 1958 to 9 million in 1972 and reaching a peak four years later, in the elections of June 1976, when the PCI culled 12.6 million votes and 228 parliamentary seats. With 34.4 percent of the votes cast, it was just four percentage points and 34 seats short of the ruling Christian Democrats, an unprecedented score for a Western Communist party. The PCI was making a credible attempt to present itself as a ‘system’ party, perhaps even (as Henry Kissinger and many foreign observers feared) an alternative government-in-waiting.
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The new approach of the Italian Party, and rather less convincing efforts by the French Party to emulate its success if not its ideas, became known as ‘Eurocommunism’—a term first coined at a November 1975 meeting of Italian, French and Spanish Communists and given official currency by the secretary-general of the Spanish Communists, Santiago Carrillo, in his 1977 essay
Eurocommunism and the State
. The Spanish Party was only just emerging from decades of clandestinity and its leaders were keen to establish their democratic credentials. Like their Italian comrades, they understood that the best way to achieve this was by taking their distance, both from the contemporary Soviet Union but also, and more significantly, from their common Leninist past.
‘Eurocommunism’ proved briefly seductive, though less to electors than to intellectuals and academics who mistook for a political revival of Marxism what was in fact an expression of doctrinal exhaustion. If Western Communists were to overcome the burden of their history and reprogram themselves as a—
the
—democratic movement of the Left, they needed to jettison more than just ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ and other rhetorical dogmas abandoned in a bonfire of the ideological vanities during the course of the 1970s. They also needed very publicly to abandon their association with Soviet Communism itself, and this even Berlinguer and Carrillo were unable to do.
Eurocommunism was thus a contradiction in terms, despite the best efforts of its spokesmen. Subordination to Moscow was, as Lenin had always intended, the primary identification tag of any Communist party. Until the disappearance of the Soviet Union itself the Communist parties of Western Europe were shackled to it—if not in their own eyes then most assuredly in the opinion of voters. In Italy, where the PCI had uniquely succeeded in establishing itself in certain regions as the natural party of (local) governance, the Communists held on to a sizeable vote, though never again scaling the heights of their 1976 successes. But elsewhere Eurocommunism’s steady decline continued almost uninterrupted. The Spanish Communists, who invented it, saw their share of the vote fall to just 4 percent by 1982.
Ironically, Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow actually gave his blessing to the Eurocommunists’ efforts to secure their local base by distancing themselves from him. The Soviet move, a by-product of the strategy of international détente then being pursued, did little for the would-be Communist reformers. But then, for all the support they continued to furnish in cash and kind, the Soviet leaders were losing interest in Western Communist parties, who had limited political impact and seemed unlikely to take power in the foreseeable future. Social Democrats, however, especially those in positions of influence, were another matter. And Social Democrats in Germany, still the crucible of a divided continent, were of very particular interest indeed.