In March 2023, after tense negotiations over climate policy, German Green Party politicians voiced frustration with their Social Democratic coalition partners, whom they believed had abandoned shared positions in order to water down environmental protections and jumpstart highway construction projects. The conflicted “history of the relationship between social democracy and ecology” (7), which is the subject of Felix Lieb's monograph, suggests that the Greens should probably not have been surprised by the Social Democrats’ waffling commitment to environmental protection. In fact, according to Lieb's analysis of the period from the formation of the social-liberal government under Willy Brandt in 1969 to the election of the red-green government under Gerhard Schröder in 1998, environmental policy was – with rare exceptions – of interest to Social Democrats only insofar as it could be used to stimulate the economy and provide new jobs.
At its core, Arbeit und Umwelt? is a closely focused and highly detailed history of debates that occurred within the SPD. Though the book covers three decades, a surprisingly consistent group of key powerbrokers and a handful of social democratic environmentalists stand at the center of Lieb's analysis. And yet, Lieb provocatively frames these intra-party discussions in the context of big historiographical debates about the political and social transformations that have shaped the period “after the boom” and informed social scientists’ recent warnings of democratic deconsolidation.
Lieb's rich history of the SPD emphasizes the extent to which social democratic principles conflicted with the prerogative to protect the environment, even as ecological devastation became increasingly evident. In noting the extent to which Social Democrats had traditionally been “proponents of emancipation through technology and economic growth” (8) and by arguing that “the SPD and its voters were not opponents, but rather children of consumer society” (285), Lieb elicits the uneasiness with which Social Democrats approached ecological topics and brings the misalignment between social democracy and what he refers to as a “post-material” (35) brand of environmentalism into focus. Indeed, even in the 1970s, when the SPD was in power and popular environmental concerns motivated protest and political engagement throughout the FRG, Lieb contends that “ecology was not an integral part of the social democratic reform program” (42).
By precisely the same token, Lieb shows how the popularization of ecological modernization theory, which posits that environmental protection can generate new (green) jobs and spur economic growth, enabled Social Democrats to more easily embrace environmental goals during the 1980s. In adopting an ecological modernist position, moreover, the SPD believed it could “take the wind from the sails” (152) of radical ecological alternatives. This approach even led to a “short ecological blossoming” (202) within the SPD in the late 1980s, when Social Democrats advocated “economic restructuring” that would “mobilize the power of the market for environmental protection” (246).
Interestingly, in spite of his detailed analysis of the complicated relationship between the FRG's principal center-left party and environmental affairs, Lieb hardly questions the assumption that environmentalism itself has been a project of the political Left. On the contrary, he highlights links between the SPD and the environmental movement, meticulously counting the (former) Social Democrats who became leaders in grassroots environmental groups or helped organize the Green Party. And though he ultimately concludes that “ecologically sensitive voter groups were not . . . simply the ‘lost children’ of the SPD,” he nonetheless perceives the Greens as a leftist party that appealed to at least some of the SPD's supporters in the “center left” (317). In the context of Lieb's broader findings about the incompatibility of social democracy and environmentalism, these assumptions represent a missed opportunity to reflect on whether what he refers to as “post-material” environmentalism can be understood as a leftist project in the first place.
Indeed, as Lieb shows, it was not only within the context of political goals that the SPD differentiated itself from the environmental movement and positioned itself vis-à-vis the Green Party. With the notable exception of Willy Brandt, most leading Social Democrats understood the citizens’ initiatives that formed in the 1970s in order to address local environmental problems as “lacking in democratic legitimacy,” since they could not claim the “representativeness of a party like the SPD, as an organization of elected office holders” (84). Even after the formation of the Green Party in 1980, prominent Social Democrats continued to argue that the Greens’ efforts to broaden the FRG's representative democracy and to organize themselves in accordance with the principle of direct democracy threatened West German parliamentary democracy. By emphasizing the SPD's low assessment of the Greens’ democratic bona fides, Lieb supports his argument that the first state-level red-green coalition governments, which were formed in the 1980s and 1990s, were options of last resort, not proof that the two parties understood themselves collectively as partners on the Left, let alone evidence that they conceived of democracy in the same way.
By articulating leading Social Democrats’ instrumental view of environmental protection, and their disdain for grassroots environmental initiatives that they conceived as challenges to the primacy of Germany's hard-won representative democracy, Felix Lieb makes a compelling argument that SPD powerbrokers were never really interested in saving the environment as an end in and of itself. Precisely this recalcitrance underpins Lieb's interpretation of this particular case study's broader importance for our understanding of politics “after the boom,” since Social Democratic environmental debates offer ample evidence that the political parties have “not only been ‘victims’ of alleged value change,” but continued to “shape ideational and social-political constellations” (382). These same findings about the durability of political parties and the extent to which the SPD, at least, insistently applied old paradigms to new questions, also – if only implicitly – indicate a seminal challenge facing proponents of transformative environmental politics in the climate change era.
