Welcome to the Greenhouse
Timothy Garton Ash
Hagen, West Germany Dear women friends and men friends! I welcome you to our fifth Federal Assembly .. ! How so me? How so one wel- comes the many? We all welcome ourselves! Let's all join hands, let us make a welcome chain, alternative and peaceful .. . ' Ner- vous giggles and awkward handclasping, as in an Anglican alternative communion ser- vice. So begins the Federal Assembly of the West German Greens, in the £10-million high-tech greenhouse which is Hagen town hall.
Dogs and punk children play around the base of the podium. Just now this is oc- cupied by a group of feminists. Taking turns to speak successive paragraphs, like characters in a Brecht play, they complain that they have not all been allowed to speak in the debate. A motion is proposed: that all the feminists should be allowed to speak in turn. Then a procedural motion: only the women in the hall should be allowed to vote on whether all the women should be allow- ed to speak. A heckler: 'What about the transvestites?' Loud laughter. An earnest young man springs up to protest at this chauvinistic, discriminatory and quite unGreen remark. Equally loud applause. Another half hour is happily passed.
A magnificent beard demands our `departure from the industrial system'. The chairperson cuts in for a 'technical an- nouncement': for those delegates who do not have cars, there is a bus to take them to their accommodation. To judge by the packed car park outside there are not many delegates without a car. We note the large Volvo estate car with the 'Nuclear Power, No Thanks!' sticker. The lady guest from an Italian party apologises for her school German. 'But it is good to speak like children,' she says. Heartfelt applause.
How tempting it is to dismiss the Greens with ridicule, these spoilt children of the Raspberry Reich — and how easy! Yet they are the single most important symptom and cause — of West Germany's current political sea-change. It is possible that they will replace the Free Democrats (FDP) in the Bundestag after the general election planned for 6 March, as they have already replaced them in two state (Land) parliaments, and thus hold the parliamen- tary balance of power. Apart from the future of mankind, the delegates are here to debate whether, and if so on what condi- tions, they would then be prepared to tolerate a Social Democrat (SPD) minority government.
Their origins could hardly be more diverse, from young ex-communists in Hamburg to old ex-Nazis in Bavaria, from the 24-year-old, pink-trousered social worker to the 59-year-old forester, Wilhelm Knabe, whom they elect as one of their new spokespersons. Green contains the spec- trum from brown to red. The majority are certainly younger people who come from the Left, and define themselves primarily by contrast with the SPD. Yet they insist that their politics are fundamentally new both in form and content. The traditional categories of Left and Right can no more be applied to them than they could be to Solidarity.
In content, they bring on to the agenda ecological and social priorities which, they claim, are largely ignored by the established parties. They are united in total opposition to all kinds of nuclear power, to the I
tion of German soil, forest and waters, to the stationing of American missiles otid, or under them. They seek alternatives Of growth-oriented economies of both PJfi and West, a (German) third way bet7 (Russian) socialism and (AmericallIc capitalism. If you think you have heard t11 somewhere before then I hasten to add0 they worry about equal rights discrimination, not only for and age women, but also for the Turkish e4 Gastarbeiter. Many are deeply conee";he about the redistribution of wealth to ., Third World, about what another Italt; guest called 'the thirty million Jews °f day' — the thirty million people being ‘e . terminated by hunger'. In form, they emphasise the °see' parliamentary character of their 01°p ment' and its 'basis democracy', agaire contrast with the established parties. iii word 'basis' — i.e. grass roots — is r" intoned by every speaker, but what democracy' means in practice is less :11w f crystal-clear. It certainly means that o are deeply suspicious of any symPt°111,sted creeping professionalism in their el, to leaders, who are obliged by their statutes retire after a maximum term of two Y Iar Thus it is that their most Ptty figurehead, Ms Petra Kelly, has'–ijt peared from the party executive just f°00. months before the crucial general eleell,0 She will, however, stand as a parlianle°'7ve candidate in the heart of conserlured Bavaria. Ms Kelly, whose father is a red Zeo US air force colonel, and who herself in America for ten years, sees a model ,,jo the Greens' extra-parliamentary agitatioi'' the civil disobedience campaign of WI:tr. Luther King. On 12 December (the arial'io, sary of NATO's 1979 'two track' res°_, in tion) they plan practice sit-down demons front of American military installa° across West Germany.
The two main tendencies within t new politics are perhaps best chara.actf, iced not by the terms 'Left' or `Riv,ur. `radical' or 'moderate', but by the labels rent at the Solidarity congress in Gdansk; autumn: 'fundamentalists' and `Pry p4 tists'. The fundamentalists believe the „er important thing is to develop a radical v. native to the basic structures of existilt ioeir ' dustrialised societies: they stand on the principles, and the elaboration of roof principles seems to them more in1P°110' then the morally dubious enterprise O„oill ing to convert them into practice tlir".pie compromise with the powers that be' coy pragmatists believe that small achievel°0 are more important than large words' die) compromise is unavoidable, and that will only keep their electoral stir:lcpc through 'propaganda of the deed%vr vanguard of the pragmatists is the ,Po. burg 'Green Alternative List' (ud tt whose leaders have already engage SPD tough, practical negotiations with theoe in the city parliament. The 'Hamburg It will be put' to the test when the city g°es
the polls again on 19 December, but it has already scored a victory within the 'move- ment'. Petra Kelly's successor, as co- spokesperson with Herr Knabe, is a leading GAL activist.
The assembly, furthermore, passed a resolution which is a first step to spelling out their conditions for tolerating an SPD minority government in Bonn. The two essential conditions in this resolution are that the Cruise and Pershing Two missiles should not be stationed on German soil in the autumn of next year, and that no more atomic energy installations should be built. One of the discoveries of a fortnight travell- ing around the political capitals of West Germany is just how little support there is for the new missiles, even in the highest echelons of the established parties. The new SPD candidate for chancellor, Herr Vogel, does not disguise his lack of enthusiasm; and even ex-chancellor Schmidt, the man who first asked for the damned things in 1977, is said to regard them now as a political rather than a military necessity. In- deed one has the impression that even the new CDU government would be glad to be let off this hook. If only the Russians can be persuaded to make some concessions in Geneva, then perhaps the Reagan Ad- ministration can be persuaded to hold back .... The ending of the gas-pipeline sanc- tions and the first American response to Mr Andropov are therefore read as hopeful signs. That still leaves the issue of 'peaceful' nuclear power, a massive enough stumbling block to any potential Green-SPD axis.
The Greens are both symptom and cause. They represent both a danger and an oppor- tunity to the West German political system. The real danger is not that of a temporarily hung parliament: it lies rather in the perspective of an extra-parliamentary movement of civil disobedience. Sit-down strikes on the supply roads to a new nuclear power station will confront the West Ger- man state (or rather, states) at the point where illiberal and anti-democratic tradi- tions are strongest: in the administration of law and order, in the police and the courts. Already in Frankfurt, following a mass demonstration against a new airport run- way, the Federal state attorney is attemp- ting to establish a legal precedent by which any would-be German Martin Luther King could find himself charged with an offence second only to high treason in gravity. We saw after the kidnapping of Hans-Martin Schleyer five years ago how quickly some West German officials and politicians snap- ped back into authoritarian law and order policies, and then the Interior Minister was still a liberal; now he is a right-wing ally of Herr Strauss. If the state (or individual states) reacted with a heavy hand, how long would the popular protest remain non- violent? The Frankfurt airport battles repeated across the country, with a cor- responding escalation of violence — that, according to very sober observers, is a real danger.
The real opportunity is not so much the prospect of a Green party in the Federal Government (although Green groups in local government can change a lot). It lies rather in the challenge to the existing parliamentary parties, and in particular to the Social Democrats, (the FDP, as we saw last week, seems to have missed the boat), to broaden their agenda and attempt to translate the new priorities of these idealistic younger voters into practical politics. That is what Willy Brandt and Herr Vogel will be trying to promise in the next few months. Now nothing was more vehement in Hagen, and nothing more calculated to raise a cheer, than the denun- ciation of these SPD attempts to steal the
Greens' clothes. Petra Kelly and her friend know very well that a reinvigoraPsi ecologically oriented SPD is what they Ile. have to fear — electorally at least. They nounce Brandt's cautious and courIe°,,, advances as pure tactics, mere 'reforall''t window-dressing. Why, they do not wri just to reform the capitalist system, tile; plan to transform it into a whollY ne d system, an eco-utopia, a land of peace w.d love in which East and West, old aldls young, men and women, will join hall welcome themselves and speak like childrel Fortunately they have some new ide as well.
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