Green Parties Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Green political parties are formally organized around the principles of Green politics. They were born out of the 1960s protest movements and the 1970s peace movements in response to what some perceived as politics without real participation, a disrespect for other nations’ sovereignty, a single-minded and one-dimensional pursuit of money, and more. At first composed primarily of well-educated young people in their twenties and thirties living in the United States and Europe, green movements, or green environmental movements, have worked to dispel the widespread misconception that to be “green” did not mean to support only nature at the expense of everything else. On the contrary, to be green meant to very well include everything else but to see it through a green lens. Hence, on the agenda of green movements across Europe were new issues related to the environment and sustainable growth as well as more traditional issues such as social security in graying societies, education, technology and science, poverty, urbanization, and population growth.

Green movements increased their influence from that of a social phenomenon to that of a political one through the creation of green political parties. Green parties’ appeal to younger generations benefited the green movements in terms of major recruitment potential and supportive voters. For example, European party systems are frequently proportional, allowing small political groups access to and influence in the government system, even if they represent only a fraction of the population. Not only could green parties emerge under these systems, they could also become coalition partners of the so-called establishment parties, and this occurred in Germany, Finland, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands in the 1990s. The United States’ two-party majority system, on the other hand, does not provide the same opportunity and thus limits the political influence of the American green movement.

Green Parties’ Success

How far have the green parties come? If their success is measured in terms of public support—a yardstick entirely compatible with the original claim of the green movements to create politics with real public participation—then the record is mixed. For example, green parties have become a permanent fixture of their respective European political systems and have expanded into Latin America, Asia, and Africa in the early twenty-first century. However, they seldom share power in the government. (A notable exception was in Germany during the Green Party’s coalition years with the Social Democrats, 1998–2005.) Green parties are part of the legislature and wield political power. To the degree to which coalition politics is a reality, green parties have become a real option, even in coalitions that as recently as the 1990s seemed impossible. Green parties, however, have not been able to become big political parties that alone can count on more than 15 to 20 percent of the popular vote.

Another way to measure the success of green parties would be to ask how much they have changed politics, and, by extension, society. Here the record is also mixed. On one hand, it is clear that traditional parties have become “greener” and more concerned with environmental issues—and not just because traditional parties are today aggressively offering coalition status. In politics, education, schools, and science, in short—as the green movement originally argued—the environment is not just a utopian issue, it is a political, social, economic, and humane one. To the degree to which the twenty-first century reveals major environmental challenges, it is not a small measure of success if those countries that have witnessed green movements and green parties since the 1980s are, in the 2000s, better prepared to face these issues.

At the same time, as much as green parties have changed politics, politics have also changed the green parties. The German Green Party, founded in 1979, realized early on that the decision to join the establishment may come with a high cost. The party eventually split into the so-called realos (realpolitik) and the fundis (the fundamentalists), the former convinced that if the party joined the political system it would have to adopt certain practices and beliefs, including the need to become political experts or experts in politics. This idea of political expert was anathema to the fundis, who were convinced that it was dangerous to become too vested in the political system and were concerned about remaining loyal to the movement’s roots. This difference between camps within green parties may be exemplary of the larger issues, including how much green parties have changed or deviated from their original objects and if they have now become victims of their own success

Bibliography:

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.
Mills, C.Wright. “Letter to the New Left.” New Left Review (September/ October 1960): 18–23.

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