Between state and society: Green political ideology in the mid‐1980s

This article discusses the political ideology of the Greens in the Federal Republic of Germany in the mid‐1980s. Finding limitations in both the survey research and ‘new social movement’ literatures, it argues that Germany's particular institutional and ideological traditions inform the Green alternative and that the powerful tradition of German statism affects Green ideology in two contradictory ways: positively, in that Greens employ statist imagery in both their critique of West German politics and their alternative vision; and negatively, in that Green ideology adopts and reflexively transposes the values of the concepts of German statism.