Germany's Political Greenhorns Take On a Few Shades of Gray
By Eckart Lohse
BERLIN. Gone are the days when it was fun to read the Greens' party programs. They used to sound so splendidly out of this world.
What classic sentences are to be found in the German Greens' first, and so far only, political platform from 1980, the year the party was founded: "The unchallenged monopolies of the centralized energy utilities already elude nearly every democratic control and subject society, in part, to a 'dictatorship from the power point.' In a full-fledged nuclear state, for compelling reasons, fundamental democratic rights and civil liberties are no longer possible."
Anyone reading the 1998 election manifesto, the most recent programmatic statement of Alliance 90/The Greens, also got his or her money's worth: "Electricity supplies in Germany would be assured even if all reactors (nuclear power stations) were shut down immediately."
And now? Now, the new platform is to state that nuclear decommissioning must be concluded systematically. A period of decades is set for the transition from the fossil-fuel era to the solar age. With so much realism, it would be superfluous to point out that after more than 20 years' existence, the Greens no longer want to be the "anti-party party" but a reform party.
Admittedly, the possibility still exists that the erstwhile rock throwers who have become sharp dressers, the ministers who do not like to be reminded of their communist past, and the party members who were once wed to various bygone movements will revert to the past and turn the present draft platform upside down. But that is unlikely.
The political platform commission has drawn up a 70-page document after more than a year of painstaking work. Most key party officials, including government ministers, have had a chance to comment on it.
The commission is scheduled to meet on Friday with leading Greens to remove the last remaining differences of opinion. Any alterations agreed to the wording will be incorporated on Saturday, and the program will be presented to the party and the public on Monday. It is hard to imagine very many fundamental changes being made afterward. That would weaken the whole leadership.
Finally, the party will have an opportunity to discuss the platform until the autumn. The Greens plan to adopt the political platform, titled "Green 2020 -- We're Thinking About the Day After Tomorrow," at a party conference in Rostock.
Naturally, some of those who have been responsible for the platform so far expect internal arguments to continue until it is adopted. As a precaution, some passages in the draft have been clearly highlighted to show that no agreement has been reached on them. To facilitate the way for party officials, who have so far been involved only on the margins, the party's business manager, Reinhard Bütikofer, has carefully worked out conceivable alternative wordings to the remaining sticking points ahead of the extended political platform commission meeting.
Page 16 f., Chapter "Departure Into the Environmental Age," Section III "Technical Efficiency Revolution and Cultural Change." Some members of the platform commission think that in Paragraph 6 the party should call for productivity gains resulting from technical renewal to result "as a matter of priority" in shorter working hours (Alternative 1). Other members do not want to make that so clear and would prefer to call for more "freely available time" (Alternative 2). Oh, well.
In any case, signs of more explosive arguments are on the horizon. One of the really serious ones could be whether future social benefits should be financed by contributions or by taxes. Here, too, alternative wordings will be available.
Considering the tradition of programmatic disputes among the Greens, only one subject seems likely to develop explosive force: foreign policy. In this area, it remains to be clarified whether the Greens want to see the introduction of a two-thirds parliamentary majority for armed missions by the Bundeswehr, the German military.
But a reading of the remaining material on foreign and security policy, which officials of the party's left wing have after all agreed on with the realists at the Foreign Ministry, offers so much sensational stuff that the dispute about the two-thirds majority seems incidental. It states in black and white that the Bundeswehr may participate in international missions "to maintain and restore" peace. It, however, does stipulate that there should be a United Nations mandate.
As recently as in the 1998 Magdeburg program, the Greens were still saying that "Alliance 90/The Greens does not support the military enforcement of peace and armed missions."
One looks in vain for the call, still raised in 1998, for the dissolution of NATO "into a pan-European peace and security order." Instead, the present draft platform says military alliances and national armies should be integrated into and transferred to a pan-European order. At least that includes their continued existence. The Greens almost broke apart over German involvement in NATO's Kosovo war in spring 1999, but in retrospect, they call it a "permissible exception." However, they would not like to see it set a precedent.
Often as they emphasize that non-military conflict solutions are to be preferred, the authors of the platform commit to paper their assessment that "unfortunately" military force cannot always be ruled out. The Greens, once so anti-American, praise in 2001 European Union cooperation with the United States. Even the NATO does not come off so badly: "Nonetheless, transatlantic relations must not remain fixated on cooperation in the military part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)."
Finally, the party that was once so critical of the nation state is willing to make its peace with the nation: "We support a democratic constitutional process in Europe in which citizens' fundamental rights are strengthened, the role of nations is respected, but the variety of the regions is seen as a strength."
The new political program's message is clear. The Greens are catching up in their program on what became part of political reality some time ago. They are bidding farewell to ideological phraseology and an attitude that is fundamentally hostile to the system.