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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 selfconscious 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
