Foreword by Claude Weinber
There are many different ways of getting involved in Green politics and mine was certainly very different. In 1987 I was director of a Belgian catering company in Brussels and, in that capacity, responsible for the menus in the restaurant of the European Parliament. Every day we had to supply 700 meals in 90 minutes taking into account the varying tastes of twelve nationalities. We were also boycotting South-African products. As if this was not already difficult enough, a staff member of the Greens one day entered our kitchen requesting that a vegetarian dish be added to the daily menu. This was outrageous! I was not amused and neither was the chef. The Green would not give in. In the end, I did but it took me seven long months to persuade the chef. I dragged him to all the vegetarian restaurants then in Brussels, each one even more esoteric than the last, and it cost me innumerable bottles of wine to whip up his enthusiasm for meatless cooking. In the end, the chef surrendered. Since then the European Parliament restaurant has always featured a vegetarian course on the menu and I have been hooked on Green politics.
In those days the Greens were a rather chaotic lot: seven Germans, two Dutch and two Belgians, if I remember correctly. In fact, their exact number was hard to tell, because every Green Member of Parliament had to share his or her term of office with a designated successor (Nachrücker), a rotation system nobody in their right mind could actually understand. They called themselves the Green Alternative European Link (GRAEL) and, being too few in number to be recognised as a parliamentary group, they had to join the Rainbow Group, another exotic ensemble encompassing various regionalists as well as the Danish People's Movement against the European Community. The German presence in the Green Group was preeminent and at times even suffocating for the representatives of the smaller countries; Green attitudes towards the European Community, its institutions and policies were unclear; common goals were hard to define, strategies on how to achieve them often passionately contested. What kept them together was a common feeling of ecological responsibility, environmental preservation and the search for an alternative economy and society. The established parties and the institutional bureaucracy watched the newcomers with suspicion. The somewhat motley crew, bizarrely dressed and coiffed, ‘desecrated’ the sacred halls of the European Parliament by organising conferences on racial equality, gay rights, AIDS and the rights of prostitutes and did not even shrink from inviting the target groups into the shrine of European democracy. The establishment was appalled; some – to their credit – were amused and even curious. These were tough and exciting times for Green politics. It was also a period of learning, not only from each other but also from the initially despised establishment. Sometimes everything seemed to sink into chaos (the ‘rotation system’ only contributed to the general hullabaloo) but, in the end, reason almost always prevailed. After five years, the first Green Group bowed out with dignity. They had come of age and they had made a difference – not only regarding the menu! The scepticism of the establishment towards the ‘intruders’ had declined. After all, the sacred walls of the parliament were still standing – even though they had become more permeable – and some of the Greens had proved to be hard workers and had earned the respect of their colleagues. The next Green Group in the European Parliament were able to enter a period of consolidation, even though their political ambitions and attitude towards the European Community were still far from clearly defined.
In the 1989 elections the Green parties won 26 seats, an astonishing breakthrough. The delegations from Germany (7) and France (8) were almost equally strong and the South was represented by four Italians (from two different Green parties) and members from Spain and Portugal. The Greens were now big enough to separate from the Rainbow Group and form their own parliamentary group under the name Green Group. The activism of the first five years diminished as the Greens became more involved in the nuts and bolts of parliamentary work. When the Wall and the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, the Green Group actively promoted the swift deepening of relations with the countries of central and eastern Europe. In November 1993, when the Maastricht treaty entered into force and the European Community turned into the European Union, the Greens seemed ready to embrace the European project. They had understood that social, environmental and other issues could be best addressed at European level.
When my professional life brought me back to Brussels on that memorable day in September 2001 that has gone down in history as 9/11, Europe was well on the way to reunification. East and West Germany had become one and the ex-communist countries of central and eastern Europe were knocking at the door of the European Union. The Greens embraced enlargement but failed to take root in central and eastern Europe. When the European elections came only a few weeks after enlargement had taken place, the Greens – the most ardent supporters of the integration of ‘the East’ – found themselves without representatives from the new Member States. After a pan-European election campaign that had started with the founding of the European Green Party (EGP), the first Europe-wide party, in Rome in February 2004, they won 35 seats. The Greens became prominent in the debate on European integration and Green members took an active part in the Convention that drafted the ill-fated European constitution.
In the 2009 elections, the Greens emerged, unexpectedly, as winners. Even though there are still no Green members from central and eastern Europe and southern Europe is clearly under-represented, the EGP member parties won 46 seats, their best ever result. The new Green Group is driven by a strong French-German motor and by the enthusiasm of many new, young parliamentarians. They will need perseverance, wisdom, imagination and a sense of reality to master the many difficult challenges ahead: climate change; the financial and economic crises; the expansion of the EU’s enlargement process; the further democratisation of the European institutions; a humane migration policy; the protection of civil rights and the role of the EU as an actor in foreign and security policy. But, the new group can start with a clean slate: the tug-of-war over the Lisbon treaty is finally over; new windows of opportunity have opened. In this spirit the European Union office of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung has invited eleven new Green Members of the European Parliament from five different countries to write about their ambitions for Europe. The Greens have come a long way since their first tentative steps in Brussels and Strasbourg and I am extremely grateful that I have had the chance to watch them grow up.
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