Beyond Europeanization: political ecology and environmentalism in Central and Eastern Europe

Introduction

This symposium is very much a direct follow-up to the 2010 special issue of Environmental Politics (19/5), “Environmental Mobilization and Organisations in Post-Socialist Europe and the Former Soviet Union’ edited by Adam Fagan and JoAnn Carmin. Published not long after the 2004 and 2007 accessions, that volume focused on how environmental activism in the post-socialist states had been regulated and configured first by the ‘transition’ from communism to liberal democracy, and then by the stipulations and choreography of the EU accession process. Indeed, the volume reads as an evaluation of that process: dealing with its effects and affects, expectations being met or not met, the role of movements and NGOs in this regard, their capacities and resources, (mal)practices of EU institutions and their influence, successful or harmful adaptation of policy, etc. Over several countries, related research found similar patterns of pre-accession and early post-accession dynamics in the region (Parau 2009, Andonova and Tuta 2014, Börzel and Fagan 2015, Noutcheva 2016, Wunsch 2016, Tokunaga 2020, Císař 2022).

More than a decade later, the contemporary outlook is remarkably different. EU accession, the light that had provided orientation through the 1990s and 2000s (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005), has faded, if not failed altogether, as argued by Krastev and Holmes (2019). In the countries under discussion in this symposium, the path to EU-membership is no longer topical, and the transformative power of ‘Europe’ is no longer the dominant determinant of environmental policy and governance. The impact of both the migrant and global financial crises have led to the rise of a virulent right-wing-populism and the instalment of anti-liberal governments and political elites.

The legacy of Europeanization was a battery of laws, formal mechanisms for compliance and regulation, and institutionalised access for non-state actors. Despite a decade of so-called ‘democratic backsliding’ (Hanley and Vachudova 2018), EU environmental standards and policy remain as normative benchmarks for all countries across the region. The new member states are no clear outliers in terms of compliance (Börzel and Buzogány 2019) even if they have a tendency to support less green climate and energy legislation at the EU level (Toshkov 2017, Buzogány and Ćetković 2021). Yet civil society autonomy and freedom to operate have been severely constrained in most of the states of the region, resulting in ‘shrinking spaces’ for civil society actors that are critical of de-democratizing tendencies. The EU has been sharply criticised for failing to protect the liberal democratic order in the region (Sedelmeier 2014, Kelemen 2020). Indeed, if the EU conjures a reaction within protests and actions of civil society and social movements, it is mostly with negative connotations, such as failure to hold domestic elites to account or encouraging mega-developments. All of this suggests that, over 30 years since environmental activism first came to political prominence in the region, there is a need to re-engage with a host of domestic factors that had become somewhat obfuscated by the emphasis on Europeanization.

To step beyond this perspective, it is useful to first take a step back and briefly historicize research the Central and Eastern European environmentalism. Looking to research on environmental activism in the region, we can identify three waves of scholarly interest. The first wave focused on the emergence of environmentalism during late state socialism and the various conflicts as part of the democratization and national awakening processes in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Vári and Tamás 1993, Dawson 1996, Baker and Jehlička 1998, Snajdr 2011). The second wave was written under the influence of professionalisation and NGO-ization of environmentalism (Fagan 2004, Jacobsson and Saxonberg 2013). The third wave became dominated by the EU’s pre-accession conditionality and the ‘Europeanization’ not only of environmental and energy policies but also of state-society relations and civil society discourses (Carmin and Vandeveer 2004, Carmin and Fagan 2010, Börzel and Fagan 2015).

A fourth wave of research, which this symposium aims to propagate, builds on these rich scholarly traditions but instead of focusing primarily on external drivers of transformation or the exogenous influences on protest forms, places primary emphasis on the specificity of the domestic or ‘local’ context. We are interested in hybrid roles and ‘repertoires of action’ used by environmental organizations that are both domestic and imported. The symposium is based on the premise that understanding what is motivating citizens across the region to protest about climate change or air pollution, to decipher their mobilisation strategies and particular framings, requires a nuanced analysis of domestic political opportunity structures, resource availability, transnational linkages, and particular dynamics of political resistance to democratic backsliding and ethno-populism. We need to return to the fundamental question of whether it is, or ever was, appropriate to frame our understanding of environmental activism and politics in Central and Eastern Europe in terms of Western norms and trajectories (Jehlička and Jacobsson 2021). What has become increasingly clear is that the roles ascribed to civil society as ‘a provider of public services, moral blueprint, or control on power’ (Jacobsson and Korolczuk 2017, p. 18) are Western concepts that remain essentially contested. Europeanization thrived on the implicit assertion that Western-style institutions and solutions were the only way forward. As these institutions and processes now appear less stable and perform differently than many had expected, it seems appropriate to question the foundations on which the transportation of ‘European’ environmental governance was based. Similar questions are to be asked also regarding the assumed role of civil society in Western political thought and external support towards the region. Seen as schools of democracy, CEE civil society was often perceived as an inherent, but nevertheless still weak force standing in for western liberal values (Howard 2003). Over time, this perspective has become gradually more tainted due to practices of NGOization, or simply the existence of ‘bad civil society’ (Kopecky and Mudde 2005) that did not fit Western concepts.

What each of the contributions to this symposium posits is that a new conceptual and theoretical approach for considering green activism in these countries is now required; one that extends beyond Western-trajectory inspired social movement theory or neo-institutionalist governance literature. From various perspectives, the early analysis of green agendas that emerged out of the implosion of state socialism is critiqued in the quest to properly comprehend forms of contemporary, and invariably innovative and radical forms of environmental politics that challenge Europeanizing institutionalisation and ‘NGOization’ in different ways (Jacobson and Saxonberg 2016, Gagyi 2021). The imperative to frame the contemporary mobilizations and politics from a broader historical or political economical perspective is not lost. Indeed, the contributors each cast the early 1990s debate about post-socialist particularism versus a ‘return to Europe’ on to the present: what, three decades later, remains peculiar and specific about the environmental politics of these countries, and to what extent are their legacies of state socialism and post-socialism generalizable on a grander scale? This also answers calls to step beyond the narrowly conjured area studies view and embed this research in a more global perspective (Gille 2010, Corry 2013)

In sum, our collection contends that the constraints shaping green activism in the region today must be viewed as an amalgam of domestic/local and global factors; the experience of late state socialism and the historical sociology of green activism in the communist and pre-communist periods are as relevant as Europeanization and the current shifts in political economic perspectives for understanding imminent forms of protest and mobilization. Rather than assuming a belated Western developmental trajectory and a notion of the CEE states ‘catching-up’ with their Western neighbours, then, we posit that bottom-up development of green activism and environmental mobilisation in the region is effectively counteracted by such assumptions in various ways. Contemporary green activism, is better understood by concentrating on actual environmental issues, assessed in their local social embeddedness, and with the eye on broader shifts in global political economy regimes.

Contributions to this symposium

The first contribution to this symposium, by Julia Szulecka and Kacper Szulecki, takes longitudinal perspective on four decades of Polish environmentalism and describes its’ ebbs and flows through a legitimacy-centred perspective (Szulecka and Szulecki 2019). Using a three-pronged conceptualization of legitimacy resting on practices, organizations and discourses, they show how various reconfiguration of legitimacy relate to the relative success of the Polish environmental movement over time. Emerging towards the end of state socialist rule, Polish environmentalism boasted strong legitimacy initially but parliamentarisation, professionalization and aid-dependence of civil society and the discursive closure due to EU accession have undermined this. The growing polarization of Polish politics after 2010 has further aggravated the triple legitimacy crisis of environmentalism. Nevertheless, the authors close on a positive note by highlighting new sources of legitimacy in recent protest action.

If the discursive closure preceding and following EU accession has contributed to the delegitimization of environmentalism in the Polish case, the second contribution to this symposium by Ondrej Císař and Jiri Navrátil fails to find any uniform effect of EU membership on environmentalism in the Czech Republic (Císař and Navrátil 2022). Focusing on environmental activism in three very different campaigns (directed against nuclear power, illegal logging, or coal mining) they use protest event data before and after EU accession. Their actor-centred perspective highlights the importance of the strategic capacity of movement actors and contradicts those assumptions made in the Europeanization literature that overemphasized how EU accession and membership shapes social movements. By contrast, these findings relate to those emphasizing domestic factors, such as party-movement linkages and party competition, to play an important in shaping the field available for environmental movements (Císař and Vráblíková 2019).

The third contribution by Aron Buzogány, Szabina Kerényi and Gergely Olt focuses on Hungary and describes cases where neither EU references, transnational networks nor political opportunity structures or resources provided by movement allies play an important role for contemporary urban mobilization (Buzogány et al. 2022). Embedded into a historical overview that spans three decades, their main focus is on the development of Hungarian environmentalism in the post-EU accession period which was marked by austerity politics, the collapse of party system and the consolidation, since 2010, of a self-termed ‘illiberal’ regime (Buzogány 2017). After 2010, a series of changes have led to the weakening of the institutional basis of environmental politics but also of domestic and external funding opportunities for environmental civil society organizations. Focusing on state-society relations, organizational and discursive developments, the article highlights internal conflicts within urban movements and the disenchantment with professional environmentalist organizations but also the re-orientation towards local action, which might strengthen environmentalism in the longer term by regaining legitimacy and mainstreaming green ideas.

Developments in Serbia largely echo those found in the Hungarian case. The article by Adam Fagan and Filip Ejdus focuses on the mobilisation campaign against the Belgrade waterfront development, initiated by the group ‘Let’s not drown Belgrade’, Ne davimo Beograd (Fagan and Ejdus 2020). Interestingly, while the Serbian green movement has spawned a developed network of efficacious and relatively prominent NGOs, which have been the recipients of extensive ‘capacity-building’ initiatives by the EU and other foreign donors, these ENGOs did not play a prominent part in the anti-waterfront protest movement. Based on extensive interviews with both activists involved in the anti-waterfront campaign and with environmental movement organisations, Fagan and Ejdus conclude that the relative absence of green activists has little to do with elite access, or the particular state-society relations but is first and foremost an issue of framing dissonance combined with a fundamental lack of resources available to ENGOs to respond quickly and effectively to new protest opportunities that have emerged.

The way forward

The contributions included into this symposium document three overall trends of CEE environmental movements. First, they readjust the perspective from one that has focused on external factors to a more domestically driven one. Second, and related, they highlight the growing importance of an environmental movement in CEE beyond the professionalized and NGOized one, that has emerged bottom-up and has both limited transnational ties and little involvement in environmental governance, which has been an important issue over the last three decades. Third, environmental groups in the analysed countries, though somehow less in the Czech Republic, face some kind closure of the civic space, which is part of the regional and also global trend towards populism.

These findings relate to two different strands of literature on civil society and social movements in the region, but are relevant also beyond strict geographical and disciplinary limits and might well shape further scholarship in the field.

The first strand of literature starts from the observation of normalisation and everyday environmentalism, which contrast to the trend towards professionalisation witnessed during the last decades. As exemplified also by the case studies on Budapest and Belgrade included into this symposium, this often involves attention to urban conflicts and research that is practice-oriented and focused at the micro-level (Baća 2021, Pietrzyk-Reeves 2022). Much of the work taking this perspective comes from sociology, political ecology, anthropology or (critical) geography. There is plenty of evidence across post-socialist Europe and the former Soviet space of green activists participating in and being empowered by urban development campaigns, against plans for large-scale leisure complexes, and on issues that seek to transform or effectively privatise public spaces (Matković and Ivković 2018, Grubbauer and Čamprag 2019, Jacobsson and Korolczuk 2020, Florea et al. 2022). What this perspective also involves is (renewed) attention to conflicts around resources, often in rural areas, that relate to ownership of land or natural resources (Velicu 2020, Davidescu and Buzogány 2021, Mihaylov 2021, Mišić and Obydenkova 2021, Soare and Tufiș 2021, Vukelić and Pešić 2022, Varga 2023). What these two literatures on urban and rural conflicts have in common is the – more often implicit than explicit – emphasis on the (semi-)peripheral position of the CEE region in global political economy. Discourses of environmental justice, radical democracy or degrowth build on this structural presumption when they challenge existing models of democracy and accumulation, or formulate bottom-up alternatives (Goldstein 2017, Velicu 2019, 2020, Gherghina et al. 2020, Hanaček et al. 2020, Milan 2022, Pungas 2022, Sircar 2022). As the increasing attention to contestations of nature and democracy by radical right-wing forces in the region shows (Kyriazi 2019, Lubarda 2019, Żuk 2022), not all these contestations fit the liberal democratic framework.

This is where the second thread of literature we wish to highlight comes in. It drives our attention beyond the narrower confines of environmental activism and brings us back to classic discussions about the role of civil society in democracy. Much of what we know about civil society has been written under the impression of the global expansion of democracy over the last decades (Bernhard 2020). Democratic backsliding in several countries of the region (Cianetti et al. 2018) and the shrinking space for civil society that follows from this development (Marzec and Neubacher 2020, Toepler et al. 2020, Mikecz 2023) lead us now back to the normative questions about the role of civil society that were central to CEE political dissidents, such Václav Havel, George Konrad or Adam Michnik. Faced with growing authoritarianism, can civil society be (again) a force that protects, or bring about, democracy? Much of the recent literature is rather optimistic and argues that strong civil society can protect from democratic deterrence (Bernhard et al. 2020) and that broad societal mobilisation is needed to defend democratic principles (Dimitrova 2018). As ever, the specific vantage point of ‘green’ civil society proves particularly revealing. Like in the late 1980s, activists appear to be most successful in contesting contemporary authoritarian politics when the environmental ‘script’ is inclusive, expansive, and somewhat inexact; most efficacy seems to be delivered when movement entrepreneurs are able to connect local mobilisations with wider networks; and, critically, where local campaigns deliver legitimacy for a new generation of political activists. Perhaps, the strongest message to emerge from our volume is that, as scholars of these phenomena, we need to be guided less by normative expectations and more by the practices of these latest iterations of Central and East European ‘civil society’ (Jacobsson and Korolczuk 2017, Pietrzyk-Reeves 2022). The contributions included in this symposium push debates in this direction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).