Environmental Politics in Southeastern Europe

Abstract

In Western Europe and North America today, environmental problems are among the most pressing items on the political and public agenda. Despite all the woeful tidings, much has been achieved over the past forty years in the effort to 'save the planet', make economic growth sustainable and halt the depletion of natural energy resources and the decline in biodiversity. Essential to these changes have been states with the resources and administrative capacity to design and implement the necessary policies, and an electorate ready to accept, if not quite demand, the prioritization of environmental issues. However, the former communist polities typically lacked both. An awareness of longterm environmental danger among citizens and policymakers alike is a precondition for the necessary investment, always costly, in alternative sources of energy, environmentally friendly production and other measures, which are often seen as restrictive . Moreover, only an affluent nation could afford to aspire to be a 'green nation', 1 but while environmentalism has always been perceived in Western Europe as typically a concern of the leftleaning, the opposite might well be true for former Eastern Bloc countries . There, concern for the environment galvanized democratic and national opposition to communism . Thus, there seems to be a clear dividing line between East and West, at least as far as environmental politics are concerned . The former communist states and Soviet republics of Eastern and Southeastern Europe had all been subjected to at least half a century of forced industrialisation, very heavy urbanisation and unrestrained consumption of land, leaving a threefold communist legacy. First, the extent of the environmental problems and the duration of unchecked modernisation; secondly, the limited options for citizens subject to communism to force state authorities to acknowledge the 1 Frank Uekötter refers to Germany as ‚the greenest nation'. Frank Uekötter, The Greenest Nation?, Cambridge/MA 2014. Both coinitiated the research framework 'Voice of Nature' , concerned with the political history of environmental governance in Europe. 366 Wim van Meurs and Liesbeth van de Grift consequences of allout modernisation; and third has been the lack of resources to support the cost of environmental policies during postcommunist transition. This special issue of Südosteuropa addresses the development over the past quarter of a century of environmental politics in Southeastern Europe and adjacent regions, and specifically in Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, and Georgia. Environmental politics are viewed as an object of European Union environmentalist politics, and the contributions offered here cover a broad range of topics, from the role of environmental movements during the fall of communism, to the subsequent rise of green NGOs and political parties, as well as the nexus between EU integration and environmentalism. However, all the articles are strictly focused on environmental politics and policymaking, and quite deliberately omit both the realities of policy implementation and the difficult question of measurable trends in environmental pollution, nature conservation, sustainable economics, and biodiversity .