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What can I hope for (from politics)? 1117
by the decision. (Let us think here of future generations, distant people
affected by our decisions, other beings, etc.) More is reguired for their
proper representation and for empathy towards their — e.g., aesthetic,
religious, etc. — manifestations which differ from the rules of rational
discourse. Ihese additional things must be given increased importance
in ecological politics, through solidarity and mutual respect and
goodwill. Eckersley emphasises that this can only occur in real
communities, where the term community means, as already seen,
agreement on the meaning of our shared things (e.g., words). This
agreement is based not on a rational foundation, but is rather the fruit
of sustained coexistence: that of shared historical experience — to be
precise: that of the shared experience of successful cooperation. (That
of shared failure starts, after a while, to inevitably undermine the mutual
trust in the meaning of coexistence and cooperation. The history of
Hungary in the past hundred years seems to illustrate this.)
Eckersley therefore goes on to question the position of the
cosmopolitan Greens. He holds that only existing communities are
capable of political self-determination and deliberation. Neither the
universality of human rights, nor global risks form a political community
of the people of the world. Nor can they legitimate the rule of a “justly”
governing global regime. Eckersley confronts the utopia of global
democracy with the transnational state, whose politics is directed not
only by the selfish interests of the decision makers, but also by a global
sense of responsibility that transcends this. The expression “ecological
citizenship”, popular in green political theory, means something similar,
namely the extension of the welfare discourse familiar to liberal
democracies to the universal principles related to environmental
interests. Thus, green democracy makes moral demands of the self¬
conscious ecological citizen and wishes the political community to
become definitively an ethical community. Some hold this to be an
idealistic notion; others — from the liberal side — to be extremely
worrying, the antechamber of a repression that appeals to moral
principles.
‘The differing views on the neutrality of the state resurface often in
the debate of globalist and localist Greens. In this debate, Eckersley
argues for the localist-bioregionalist position. His important recognition
is that taking global responsibility and being open to other cultures and
interests is not only not an obstacle to the attachment of the members
of a political community to their own particularities and territory, but
is in fact the unavoidable condition of the development of any behaviour