The Green Movement: a Socio-Historical Exploration

Abstract

The green movement in Western Europe is analysed from three angles. Ideologically it is seen as a movement concerned with all the cracks in the Western social formation, its economy, its security system, its basic structures, its way of life, including its excesses. As such the movement serves as an umbrella movement for a number of partial movements, the most important ones being the ecology, women's and peace movements. However, the Green Movement depends for its success on its ability to give equal primacy to all constituent movements, not declaring that one is more important than the others. Historically the movement can be seen as the last in a series of four transformations of the classical Western social formation, the first being the struggle of the state against the church, the second of the bourgeoisie to rule the state and the third, the working class to get access to the structure created by the preceding transformations. Finally, the movement is characterised sociologically through the recruitment profiles, in terms of motivations and capabilities, and an effort is made to explore why the movement is so weak in France and so strong in Germany and the Nordic countries.