The Neoliberalisation of Green Party Politics

This book traces the changing forms of environmental thought in Finnish and German Green party politics from the 1980s to the early 2000s, focusing primarily on the 1990s political turn from green radicalism to moderate market-friendly reformism.

Earlier green radicalism questioned Western understanding of nature as resource storage for human economic gains and the idea of well-being as material consumption. The new reformism took these presuppositions concerning well-being and nature for granted and focused on developing environmentalism within the paradigm of economic competitiveness and growth. The book argues that new political views were generated under a new tradition of thought, signifying an ideological revolution from earlier ideals. The book analyses this change as part of a larger European paradigm shift, taking into account the post-Cold War political landscape which emphasised global competition and forced European environmentalists to seek new market-friendlier ways to conceptualise greenness, adopting more economically oriented language and goals. It illuminates why public discourse around environmental well-being often reverts to anthropocentric economic interests in the context of party politics. Moving beyond the two primary case studies, the book also provides an environmental historical perspective on the neoliberalisation of European politics and the monumental impact this had on environmental thinking in the region.

The Neoliberalisation of Green Party Politics will appeal to scholars, researchers and students interested in the history of environmentalism, human-nature relationships, and political and economic history.