Making Greens See Red: German Green Party leader (and Foreign Minister in Germany's first Red-Green Coalition Government) Joschka Fischer, copped an earful of abuse (and red paint) after endorsing the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Paint-bombs notwithstanding, the special Green Party conference which convened at Bielefeld to debate Fischer's decision voted to put the retention of political power ahead of its pacifist principles. Sometime between now and 2014 New Zealand's Greens face an equally uncomfortable appointment with reality.
“WARMONGERS! WARMONGERS!”, chanted the protesters as Green
Party delegates, escorted by police, made their way into Bielefeld’s
Seidensticker Hall. It was May 13 1999 and the Children of May 1968 had an
appointment with Reality.
Over the rogue state of Serbia NATO bombers were staging a
“humanitarian intervention” on behalf of the threatened citizens of the
breakaway province of Kosovo. For the first time since the end of World War II,
German forces were engaged abroad.
Joschka Fischer, Green Party leader and Foreign Minister in
Germany’s first Red-Green Coalition Government, had endorsed the decision to
intervene. At Bielefeld, 800 delegates would decide whether or not his dramatic
departure from the Green Party’s founding principle of “Non-Violence” would
stand. The long-simmering battle between the right-leaning “Realos” (Realists)
and the left-leaning “Fundis” (Fundamentalists) was about to be decided.
As it usually does, “Reality” won the day at Bielefeld. The
German Greens, faced with the choice of modifying their principles or stepping
away from their coalition with the Social Democrats, decided (415/335) to
modify their principles. All violence might be awful – but some forms of
violence were more awful than others.
The NATO sorties continued.
Whether they believe the German Greens grew up – or sold out
– at Bielefeld, New Zealand’s Greens, at some point during the next three
years, will inevitably be faced with a Bielefeld of their own.
It is entirely unrealistic for a political party to join a
coalition government without first acknowledging the inevitability of
compromise. This is especially true if the party in question attracted fewer
votes, and thus has fewer seats, than its prospective partner. The larger party
cannot be expected to re-order its policy priorities or sacrifice its leading
personnel merely to keep its junior partner happy. To do so would attract – and
merit – universal scorn.
Such are the brutal realities of coalition politics. Parties
either accept them – and become genuine players in the political game. Or, they
reject them and remain permanent political spectators.
It is really only the world’s Green parties which struggle
to accept these largely self-evident rules. As the ideological offspring of May
1968 (the year in which the great counter-cultural uprising of the world’s
youth reached its zenith) the prototypical German Greens eschewed all political
hierarchy in favour of “Appropriate Decision-Making” – by which they meant
“grass-roots”, “bottom-up”, consensus-based democracy. And this was no mere
rhetorical flourish: Greens really do believe that the way they arrive at major
decisions is every bit as important as the decisions they make.
All of which lays a heavy burden on the shoulders of Russel
Norman and Metiria Turei. Rather than laying claim to portfolios their
prospective coalition partners in the Labour Party couldn’t possibly agree to
assign them (not without opening up huge divisions within its own ranks) the
Greens’ co-leaders should be thinking about how to reconcile their fellow party
members’ to the unavoidable compromises of coalition politics.
Because these are likely to be both numerous and
unpalatable. On practically every economic and social issue that matters the
Greens have positioned themselves well to the left of Labour. That being the
case, very few, if any, of the Greens’ preferred solutions to the high dollar,
unemployment, child poverty, homelessness, climate change and dirty dairying,
will win Labour’s unqualified endorsement.
As a political party on its way to the Treasury Benches, the
New Zealand Greens would be wise to learn from the experience of their German
counterparts. Tumultuous gatherings on the model of the Bielefeld Conference
make for the most stunning political theatre, but the long-term consequences in
terms of preserving ideological coherence, or even the enduring good-will and
commitment of the party rank-and-file can be extremely debilitating.
It wasn’t just an earful of red-paint that the “warmonger”,
Joschka Fischer, received in the Seidensticker Hall. His role in undermining
the Green’s pacifist traditions won him a new and much less flattering image
than the “principled activist” persona he had worn since 1968.
Reality plays no favourites.
This essay was
originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The
Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru
Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 December 2012.
