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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.
