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Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe

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Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe POLITICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN EASTERN EUROPE Kovacs (ed.) EDITED BY ESZTER KRASZNAI KOVACS Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe is a wonderful volume that makes an excellent set of unique contributions to the political ecology and political anthropology of Eastern European environmentalism, environmental policy and the post-socialist transition. In fact, there is no other project like it as far as I am aware of, and the collection of engaging and critical chapters will surely be a sought-after resource for the present and future scholarship of the region. The project is timely and significant and will help to push theory and ethnography forward into new and fresh POLITICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN EASTERN EUROPE ENVIRONMENT IN EASTERN POLITICS AND THE areas of inquiry. -Edward Snajdr, John Jay College of Criminal Justice Europe remains divided between east and west, with differences caused and worsened by uneven economic and political development. Amid these divisions, the environment has become a key battleground. The condition and sustainability of environmental resources are interlinked with systems of governance and power, from local to EU levels. Key challenges in the eastern European region today include increasingly authoritarian forms of government that threaten the operations and very existence of civil society groups; the importation of locally-contested conservation and environmental programmes that were designed elsewhere; and a resurgence in cultural nationalism that prescribes and normalises exclusionary nation-building myths. This volume draws together essays by early-career academic researchers from across eastern Europe. Engaging with the critical tools of political ecology, its contributors provide a hitherto overlooked perspective on the current fate and reception of ‘environmentalism’ in the region. It asks how emergent forms of environmentalism have been received, how these movements and perspectives have redefined landscapes, and what the subtler effects of new regulatory regimes on communities and environment-dependent livelihoods have been. Arranged in three sections, with case studies from Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Serbia, this collection develops anthropological views on the processes and consequences of the politicisation of the environment. It is valuable reading for human geographers, social and cultural historians, political ecologists, social movement and government scholars, political scientists, and specialists on Europe and European Union politics. POLITICS AND THE This is the author-approved edition of this Open Access title. As with all Open Book publications, this entire book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital editions, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at http://www. openbookpublishers.com ENVIRONMENT IN Cover image: ‘People before coal’ action (Warsaw, 18 November 2013). People from around the world gathered in front of Poland’s Ministry of Economy in protest of the World Coal Association’s International Coal and Climate Summit organised on the sidelines of the 19th UN climate change conference. Flickr, https://bit.ly/3wumjlP Cover Design by Anna Gatti. EASTERN EUROPE book eebook and OA editions also available OPEN EDITED BY ESZTER KRASZNAI KOVACS ACCESS OBP https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2021 Eszter Krasznai Kovács. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Eszter Krasznai Kovács (ed.), Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0244 Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the list of illustrations. In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0244#copyright. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0244#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 9781800641327 ISBN Hardback: 9781800641334 ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800641341 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781800641358 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781800641365 ISBN XML: 9781800641372 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0244 Cover image: ‘People before coal’ action (Warsaw, 18 November 2013). People from around the world gathered in front of Poland’s Ministry of Economy in protest of the World Coal Association’s International Coal and Climate Summit organised on the sidelines of the 19th UN climate change conference. Flickr, https://bit.ly/3wumjlP Cover design by Anna Gatti PART II 5. Far-right Grassroots Environmental Activism in Poland and the Blurry Lines of ‘Acceptable’ Environmentalisms Balsa Lubarda More than a decade ago, the rise and subsequent mainstreaming of right-wing populism and far-right politics seemed unimaginable to many. In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, articulating nationalism as the ‘reclaiming of politics’ and the panacea to transitional hardships has brought populist (and) far-right parties to major electoral successes. This has allowed a number of far-right actors (not necessarily parties) to engage in various debates, including topics related to the natural environment. This chapter seeks to determine how far-right groups in Poland, Ecolektyw (formerly Greenline Front Polska) and Puszczyk-Naturokultura Polska (also associated with Praca Polska) convey their ideological positions concerning the natural environment, as well as how this ideological content becomes embedded in and amended through activism. The political far right in Poland has evolved with, but also in opposition to, the populist radical right. Following Fidesz, their successful role model in Hungary, the Polish Law and Justice Party, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS), used the Manichean, binary logic of the ‘good people’ and a ‘corrupt elite’ to sweep away most of their political opponents. Ever since 2005, when PiS first came to power under the banner of a “moral revolution” (Harper, 2018: 29), the party has purposefully tried both to entrench its political power and monopolise © 2021 Balsa Lubarda, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0244.05 122 Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe historical narratives, asserting its status as the defender of traditional values. In spite of PiS’s alleged intention to have “only the wall” to their right (Harper, 2018: 59), the diversified far-right1 landscape in Poland has served predominantly as the opposition to the ruling party, particularly since 2015 when PiS re-entered government. As the far- right party opposition to PiS is relatively formally weak (Ruch Narodowy with six members of Sejm in the Lower House of Parliament integrated in the Konfederacja coalition), it devotes its attention to topics that are electorally lucrative, such as migration, EU regulations and questions of collective identity. However, this is not the case with far-right movements, which regardless of their limited financial resources, have greater space for manoeuvring and engaging with various topics, such as the environment. This not only highlights particular social imaginaries (Castoriadis, 1975) but also bears a substantive and ideological morphology (Freeden, 1996), distinguishable from right-populist accounts on the environment. For instance, the right-wing populist emphasis on protecting ‘the people’ often used as a justification for anti-environmental stances and policies, is notably different fromthe far right’s endorsement of environmental protection through the intricate relationship of the nation and the land (see Forchtner and Kølvraa, 2015). Nevertheless, both the right-wing populist party in power (PiS) and far-right parties in opposition (Ruch Narodowy—Konfederacja) have been recognised either as climate sceptics or as outright deniers of anthropogenic climate change (see Lockwood, 2018: 715; Żuk and Szulecki, 2020). This attitude is in line with post- materialist renderings of environmentalism as being an (unwanted) offspring of democratic transformation (Inglehart, 1971). In contrast, there are far-right movements in Poland specifically focused on environmental activism. The far-right’s propensity for grassroots organising (for examples, see Castelli, Gattinara and Froio, 1 This can partly be attributed to problematic definitional properties of the far right, which is itself a contested term, overhauled by ambiguities and malleable features. I will here employ the term ‘far right’ instead of some other catchall terms used by scholars, such as the radical right, extreme right, hard right, right-wing populism, radical nationalism, neofascism,
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