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What can I hope for (from politics)? 1113
of the European democracies verbally so committed to the protection
of the environment.!”
The unsustainability of the rigid interpretation of neutrality probably
escaped notice for so long, because in the so-called welfare states the
basic questions faced by politics were characterised by a wide-ranging
agreement. The neutral state was by no means neutral. Its decisions
obviously served the established value system: technical-scientific
progress, economic growth, businesspeople’s profit and welfare as
identified with the growth of individual consumption. However, the
age of peaceful cooperation ended for ever around the turn of the second
millennium. Doubts arose regarding basic values and polar opposite
views clashed again, about how to judge the interconnected
environmental, economic, security, demographic and other crises and
especially regarding the course of action to be taken. In this tense
situation, when we have to pay attention to the serious threats to our
life opportunities and the far-reaching consequences and changed time
horizon of our decisions simultaneously, the restoration of the meaning
of politics appears unavoidable. Politics has to become an open contest
again, where the goodness of the goals are debated and not how to
divide the means, in the knowledge that the consequences of the
decision will impact the future of the affected communities for a much
longer period than hitherto. This undeniably limits the options of good
ways of life available to the individual, or at least limits them in a
different way to how it has hitherto been the case in industrial societies,
where free choice of one’s way of life was identified with the decisions
of the consumer and made available according to the measure of
demand. ‘The difference is merely that henceforth the choices of the
individual require not financial coverage, but good argumentation and
moral justification.
I am well aware that this is the most delicate statement of the
philosophy of ecopolitics. Its followers must honestly admit that they
do not think it good for all desires to be fulfilled, that not every way of
life is worthy of respect and that we cannot do anything we are capable
of and deem advantageous for ourselves. We can no longer wish things to
be good for everyone, because we can already see that the consequences
would be bad for everyone. To avoid or at least mitigate these negative
12 Daniel Hausknost: Ihe environmental state and the glass ceiling of transformation.
Environmental Politics 29.1. 2020.