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The Czech Environmental Movement’s knowledge interests
in the 1990s: compatibility of Western influences
with pre-1989 perspectives
Journal Article
How to cite:
Jehlicka, Petr; Sarre, Philip and Podoba, Juraj (2005). The Czech Environmental Movement’s knowledge
interests in the 1990s: compatibility of Western influences with pre-1989 perspectives. Environmental
Politics, 14(1) pp. 64–82.
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http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1080/0964401042000310187
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1
The Czech Environmental Movement’s Knowledge Interests in the
1990s: Compatibility of Western Influences with pre-1989 Perspectives
PETR JEHLIČKA, PHILIP SARRE, JURAJ PODOBA
Petr Jehlička is Lecturer in Geography and Philip Sarre Senior Lecturer in Geography,
both at the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. Juraj Podoba is Research Fellow at the
Institute of Ethnology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, Slovakia. e-mail
p.v.sarre@open.ac.uk or p.jehlicka@open.ac.uk
The research project from which this article arises was funded by the Faculty of Social
Sciences of the Open University. An earlier version appeared in the RSC Working Paper
series of the European University Institute in Florence, under the title ‘Czech
Environmental Discourse after a Decade of Western Influence: Transformation Beyond
Recognition or Continuity of the pre-1989 Perspectives’.
Abstract
The conventional interpretation of the Czech environmental movement in the political
science literature contrasts its role as part of the revolution of 1989, seen as
spontaneously local, with a period of westernisation in the 1990s. This paper argues,
primarily on the basis of interviews with key movement intellectuals, that this
interpretation neglects the earlier history of the movement, which gives it a distinctly
Czech identity, albeit one that was compatible with many of the western influences
brought to bear in the 1990s. The result is a movement based principally on the
assumptions of ‘liberal environmentalism’ with limited development of more politically
radical analyses and arguments.
Introduction
A number of scholars, especially political scientists, who have analysed the development
of Central and East European (CEE) environmental movements in the post-1989 period,
have identified a trend towards ‘westernisation’.
The environmental movement in CEE has undergone profound transformation:
the movement has shifted from being a mobilising agent for populist protest
against the totalita of the Communist regime and in its place has emerged
pragmatic, goal-oriented professional organisations. Western aid agencies and
environmental peer groups have had a strong influence on this transformation.
The transformation has brought advantages to environmental NGOs. However, it
has also resulted in a loss of the local perspective, with its distinct modus
operandi and bottom-up input, and this has impoverished political discourse in the
transition states [Jancar-Webster, 1998: 69; our emphasis in bold].
2
Similarly, Carmin and Hicks [2002: 317] conclude that in the 1990s ‘(t)he Czech and
Polish environmental movements continued developing similar structures, with both
more resembling Western and other transnationally-linked movements’. On the basis of
manifest transformations of the organisational form and function of the movements, this
literature also makes the assumption that western involvement led to equally far-reaching
changes in the substantive knowledge of activists [Hicks and Carmin, 2000]. With few
exceptions [e.g. Rinkevicius, 2000], the existing literature contains little insight into the
worldviews, values, ideas and long-term goals of the environmental movement in CEE in
the late 1990s.
A few authors [Tickle and Vavroušek, 1998; Jehlička, 2001] have attempted to
put forward a more comprehensive history of the Czech environmental movement
covering the period from the 1970s to the 1990s. Most of the recent accounts of the
development of the Czech environmental movement focused on de-radicalization of the
movement in the mid-1990s [Fagin and Jehlička, 1998] and international influences on
the movement [Carmin and Hicks, 2002; Fagan and Jehlicka, 2003]. Conceptually, this
literature is based, for the most part, on resource mobilisation theory and political
opportunity structure approaches. But it says comparatively little about the underlying
beliefs and worldviews of the Czech environmental movement. Our goal is to fill this
lacuna. Our experience of events in CEE and our geographical understanding of the way
that local differences have persisted, and should be conceptualised, under globalisation
[Massey, 1999] suggested that such an enquiry would have to be guided by an approach
with a broad sensitivity to cultural differences and ability to link values and beliefs to
political strategy and tactics. Such an approach is identified in the next section, following
which our survey and results are presented.
Knowledge Interests and Movement Intellectuals
In carrying out this research, we have been influenced by the approach mapped out over
more than a decade by Jamison and his collaborators, since it combines a broad
interdisciplinary perspective with clear conceptual and methodological development.
Starting from dissatisfaction with the unhelpful divisions of environmental social science,
both between disciplines and between US empiricism and European grand theory, these
authors have built an approach which overcomes the early division of social movement
studies between ‘resource mobilisation’ and ‘identity formation’ schools. The key
proposal, elaborated in Eyerman and Jamison [1991] is that social movements should be
studied in historical and comparative context and with a focus on ‘cognitive praxis’ –
ideas as manifested in action as part of experimental or emergent counter cultures
engaged with, and trying to change, dominant cultures.
Jamison et al. [1990b] identified three kinds of ‘knowledge interest’ –
cosmological, technical and organisational – and used them to demonstrate that the
environmental movement emerged very differently in Sweden, Denmark and the
Netherlands. The cosmological dimension consists of worldview assumptions, attitudes
to nature and society, and of their interrelationships. The technological dimension refers
to specific technological issues around which the movement develops including the
3
articulation of specific concerns in their practical activity. The organisational dimension
concerns the movement’s organisational paradigm, the modes of organising the
production and dissemination of knowledge.
When we designed the research, we had some concern about applying an
approach which had been developed to deal with the 1960s and 1970s to events in the
1990s, especially after a period which has been widely seen as one of globalisation.
However, Jamison and Baark [1999] not only articulated the stages of development of the
environmental movement towards ecological modernisation in the 1990s but also showed
that the different geography, history, culture, institutions and political styles of Denmark
and Sweden had resulted in ecological modernisation being played out in significantly
different forms in the two countries. Jamison [2001] reiterated and extended that
argument, adding the different experience in the US and pointing also to different
processes in India. He focused on distinct national policy styles, cultural biases and
movement legacies as constraints on, and resources for, environmental activists.
Within a particular national context, a social movement has to relate to these
national styles even while it is engaged in trying to change them. In so doing, ‘movement
intellectuals’ [Eyerman and Jamison, 1991: 98] articulate the knowledge interests and
cognitive identity of the movement in ways which are designed to mobilise activists and
appeal to wider publics. Movement intellectuals are distinguished from ‘established
intellectuals’, who, while taking some part in the formation of the movement, are based
in official institutions and hence tend to articulate more ‘establishment’ views [Jamison et
al., 1990a]. Recently, west European environmentalism has been seen as characterised by
a tendency towards ecological modernisation, supplemented by a radical countercurrent
of more oppositional groups like the anti-roads protest movement [van der Heijden,
1999], and ecological modernisation itself is seen to vary from weak to strong, depending
on the ability of the environmental movement to argue for more critical viewpoints
[Christoff, 1996]. In such circumstances, a higher proportion of environmental experts
are likely to be incorporated into business and the state, so the ‘movement intellectuals’
associated with NGOs face different challenges from those of their predecessors in earlier
decades and in particular a dilemma between pursuit of greater incorporation and
engagement with direct action [Rootes, 1999]. This was especially so in CEE, where the
transition was influenced by strong international pressures to move towards sustainable
development and the new international norm characterised by Bernstein [2000] as ‘liberal
environmentalism’.
4
Investigating the Cognitive Praxis of the Czech Environmental Movement
Although many Czech environmental groups published their own periodicals at some
point of their existence, these were often irregular, as they usually depended on the
availability of grant funding. In the latter half of the 1990s, the withdrawal of grant
funding not only terminated Děti Země’s (Children of the Earth) magazine Alternativy
but also temporarily discontinued the publishing of Nika, a bimonthly of the Prague
branch of Český svaz ochránců přírody (ČSOP; Czech Union of Nature Conservationists)
that played a historic role in the late 1980s. The only periodical that systematically
discussed and deliberately sought to shape knowledge interests, was Hnutí DUHA’s
(Rainbow Movement) monthly Sedmá generace (The Seventh Generation). While our
research was informed by this and other existing printed and electronic materials such as
magazines Veronica and Hnutí Brontosaurus’s (Movement Brontosaurus) Ekolist, in our
quest to identify contours of Czech environmental movement’s knowledge interest we
had to rely primarily on interviews with movement intellectuals.
Twenty-one in-depth interviews with leading movement intellectuals were
conducted in winter 1998/99. Although the main criterion for selecting respondents was
their personal saliency within the movement we are also convinced that, with the possible
exception of the Brno-based group NESEHNUTÍ,1
which represents a more radical
current, the information and opinions provided by 21 respondents captures the breadth of
the Czech environmental movement in the late 1990s. We spoke to people from a
traditional conservation organisation, from campaigning groups that are the backbone of
environmental movement at present, with people whose activity can be best described as
consultancy, with a director of an organisation that serves as an intermediary between
environmental groups and state central authorities as well as with a veteran activist whose
work could now be characterised as applied ecology research but who at the same time
was a presenter of a public TV environmental programme. Our research covered all
important centres of Czech environmental activism. The interviews took place in Brno,
České Budějovice, Liberec, Olomouc, Plzeň, Prague, and Ústí nad Labem. We
interviewed people representing 13 different environmental groups.
Although we would not claim that we spoke to all movement intellectuals, we are
confident that we managed to interview the majority of the most salient personalities of
the Czech environmental movement. The respondents were people who were nationally
known at least within the environmental movement’s circles and who contributed to the
periodicals listed above.2
In fact, several of them were publicly known personalities, as
they were regularly present in the electronic and printed media. We did not include those
intellectuals who would fall into the category of established rather than movement
intellectuals, according to Eyerman and Jamison’s [1991] distinction. This function is
primarily performed in the Czech context by several university professors. We briefly
refer to their works and influence on the Czech environmental movement in the section
on formative experiences.
Our contention that interviewing the Czech movement’s intellectuals about their
knowledge interests would be a pioneering work was confirmed on a number of
occasions by respondents themselves. Apart from four interviewees based in Prague, who
complained about being approached with requests for an interview rather too often, the
majority of our respondents living outside Prague had never been interviewed except by
5
local journalists on topical issues. After the interview, many respondents commented that
this was the first time that somebody was interested in their worldviews, beliefs and past
formative experiences.
Fourteen respondents were men, seven were women. Twelve respondents were
full-time employees of their environmental organisations. The majority of interviewees
turned out to be veterans who joined the movement in the pre-1989 period. The average
age of the respondents was 33 and only three were below 25 at the time of the interview.
Most respondents (15) were past members of at least one of the two conservationist
groups that legally existed in the 1970s and 1980s – ČSOP (8) and Brontosaurus (9).
The importance of pre-1989 formative experience was suggested by the finding
that nine out of our 21 respondents completed their full time education, including
university education, prior to 1989. As Kundrata pointed out at the beginning of the
1990s, ‘one has to take into consideration the fact that since the 1950s, at least 90 per
cent of university graduates received a highly specialised education not based on a
holistic or global approach’ [Kundrata 1992: 32]. Moreover, during the Communist
period the structure of university education was heavily biased in favour of technical and
scientific disciplines. Graduates in these disciplines, if we count medicine as science,
made up about 80 per cent of all university graduates. Out of 19 respondents to our
survey who held a university degree or were currently studying for it, 7 had a background
in scientific disciplines, including four who studied biology or ecology. Seven were
graduates of polytechnics or agricultural universities, two respondents were lawyers, two
studied linguistics, and one did sociology.
However, while the availability of social sciences, arts and humanities
programmes was growing during the 1990s, only a tiny minority of students was enrolled
in these programmes even in the second half of the decade (the proportion of students
studying humanities and social sciences increased from 2.5 per cent in 1989 to 11.6 per
cent in 1997). The 1990s brought little change to this educational experience of Czech
environmental movement intellectuals. Only two respondents whose first degree was
either in science or agricultural studies felt that they needed to extend their education
beyond scientific ecological expertise and were completing a second degree in social and
political sciences:
I felt that biology or ecology was not enough, that what was needed was to have a
background in social science, to understand the political system for example,
because an environmental activist is not only an expert - ecologist, but also a
citizen, who needs to have a knowledge of law.....(INTERVIEW 12/2/99).
6
Czech Environmental Knowledge Interests in the Late 1990s: Summary of Research
Findings
The Czech environmental movement’s knowledge interests as set out below are a
collection of features shared by the majority of our respondents rather than an exhaustive
list of elements to which all respondents would subscribe. We do not deny that, as
everywhere else, a large variety of ideas and beliefs can be found in the Czech
environmental movement. However, at the same time we believe that it makes sense to
attempt to identify the dominant knowledge interests of the Czech environmental
movement. On the basis of detailed scrutiny of transcripts of the in-depth interviews with
the environmental movement’s intellectuals we strove to detect the fundamental beliefs
and ideas with which the Czech environmental movement as a whole could be identified.
Organising our findings in a similar way to Eyerman and Jamison’s [1991] approach, the
following is how we interpret the Czech environmental movement’s environmental
knowledge interests of the late 1990s:
Cosmological dimension: Environmental degradation is usually seen as arising from
business activities that are supported by local or national politicians, but this almost never
amounts to the identification of some structural features of liberal capitalism as causes of
these problems. Nature is perceived in a clearly anthropocentric perspective, in which it
is subordinated to humans’ well-being. One of the main reasons for the importance of
fighting for better environmental protection is the potential of health risks to the current
and future generations arising from industrial pollution or other types of environmental
degradation.
The most important thing for us is that we want to make sure that the generation
of our children and our grandchildren can live here (INTERVIEW 20/1/99).
Nature itself is seen as robust within limits, i.e. the environment will tolerate a certain
degree of damage.3
Scientific evidence and expert knowledge are the main criteria
according to which environmental disputes should be resolved. Liberal democracy and
the market economy are the preconditions for effective solutions to environmental
problems. Conversion at the individual level will trigger social change.
There is a coalition of teachers in this town who teach ecological education. I
think that everything is in children. I don't think that one can have big goals in
this. The only way forward is to disseminate doubts (INTERVIEW 17/2/99).
A striking feature of the Czech environmental movement’s cosmology is that it almost
completely ignores social, political and economic structures more nuanced than state and
market. Systemic change as a precondition for resolution of environmental problems is
often explicitly rejected.
We do not see the solution in the change of the social system because other
systems would also cause (environmental) problems (INTERVIEW 30/9/98).
7
Technological dimension: Czech environment movement intellectuals do not demonise
technology, with the partial exception of nuclear power, but see it as a means that both
creates and solves problems, so that it is up to people how they choose to use it. It can be
a partial solution to current problems, along with the employment of market-based and
flexible instruments of environmental policy. Small-scale technology is preferred.
Technology can play a particularly positive role in the shift towards increased efficiency,
through the use of renewables.
(C)ars consuming less petrol, better insulation of houses - it's not a solution in
itself but it's a partial solution (INTERVIEW 29/3/99).
Organisational dimension: Apart from ‘civil society’ very few collective actors are
recognised. The central components of civil society are activist groups such as the
environmental ones. As to members of environmental groups, they are expected to create
a community of friends who can trust each other.
We have had long debates about how to recruit new members. I am a sceptic by
nature and hence I have always argued that when people who we do not know
want to join us, we should be cautious. We do not know how they behaved during
the previous regime and we cannot know what they would do as members of our
group (INTERVIEW 20/1/99).
The desired role for environmental groups is that of a mediator between individual
citizens, or, preferably, locally based informal groups of citizens, and the central state
authorities. Environmental groups should be consulted by central authorities and treated
as partners. Rational arguments and behaviour are preferred to emotionally motivated
behaviour.
At the beginning we were those who stand somewhere with a protest banner and
at the same time have a few arguments. There was a lot of enthusiasm in it then,
but I think that over the years we have managed to change the image of our
organisation in the eyes of the public, state officials and investors so that they are
now accepting us as partners (INTERVIEW 17/2/99).
The main agents are human subjects. More specifically, the end-product of environmental
groups’ activities at the local level is an individual who through a conscious value-based
lifestyle change helps to create a more harmonious relationship between society and the
environment.
The common denominator of all those things I am involved in is to try to help to
formulate and disseminate different values and to identify how these values can
influence our way of thinking (INTERVIEW 11/02/99).
In the long-term perspective, the solution is in ecological education leading to
changed individuals’ consciousness (INTERVIEW 30/9/98).
8
According to the emphasis placed on the market economy and the individual, an
important role is ascribed to green consumerism guided by self-interest.
We definitely aim to influence individuals. For instance by disseminating
information about washing powder without phosphate. We enclose it to
consumers magazines and newspaper supplements…..Consumers should
demand washing powder without phosphate (INTERVIEW 19/1/99).
Administrative regulation as well as infinite economic growth are stigmatised. The state
has a part to play here too, however, as it should guarantee that individuals have a choice
between environmentally harmful and environmentally friendly consumption, the latter
seen as economically more beneficial.
Ecofriendly behaviour is also economically sound. It's been proved many times
that people respond to economic stimuli very quickly (INTERVIEW 12/2/99).
Summary: Overall, the positive view of the market and the emphasis on individual
behaviour fitted well with what Bernstein [2000] calls ‘liberal environmentalism’. In our
view, Czech environmental movement intellectuals were less prone to radical critique of
capitalist society than would be the case for west European environmentalists. There
were a small number of individuals, associated with local protest or with more radical
groups like Hnutí DUHA, who have more interests in changing social structures, but they
seemed to us less radical than their western counterparts. Some of our respondents
indicated that they had had these kinds of belief for decades. These influences persisting
from a relatively distant past prompted us to look at the earlier experiences of our
respondents.
Formative Experience of Environmental Movement Intellectuals
As shown above, the Czech environmental movement is still largely led by people who
rose to prominence in the movement around 1989. They joined and later started to shape
a movement that, if compared with its western contemporaries, inevitably grew out of a
much narrower range of influences and inspirations. Environmentalism was not allowed
to develop as a social and political critique of or as a visionary alternative to the existing
social order. The most visionary perspective was probably that advanced by Josef
Vavroušek, a key movement intellectual both before and immediately after 1989, who
placed a strong emphasis on value and lifestyle conversions at the individual level as a
precondition of the more harmonious relationship between the environment and society.
But other sources such as women’s rights-, radical participatory-, anti-nuclear- and
animal rights movements and various spiritual and eastern philosophical currents were
not part of the Czech environmental movement experience.
The influences that were reported as significant included some surprises. When
asked to identify other than educational and family influences that they thought had a
formative effect on their environmental views, five of our interviewees mentioned their
tramping experience4
and four their membership in boy scouts.5
Four interviewees
9
mentioned as their childhood formative experience romantic books by authors such as
Karl May (a 19th century German writer of books about the US Wild West), Ernst
Thompson Seton and Jaroslav Foglar, the Czech writer of books on boy-scouting.6
These findings were a reminder that the pre-1989 Czech environmental movement
developed in virtual intellectual isolation from western environmental thought of the
1960s, 1970s and 1980s. During the Communist period communication of Czech
environmentalists with their western counterparts or academics was non-existent and
western environmentalist literature was not accessible. In the early 1990s Kundrata
[1992: 34] noticed that ‘even within the (Czech) environmental movement there are few
people who have a deep knowledge of the works of the Club of Rome; the names of E.F.
Schumacher, A. Toffler, F. Capra and others are almost unknown’.7
The 1990s brought only a marginal improvement in this area. Very few classic
books of western environmentalism were published in Czech during the 1990s. The
consequence was that many Czech environmental movement intellectuals were only
cursorily acquainted with western literature on social and political analysis of
environmental problems. This was confirmed during our interviews. The most frequently
mentioned foreign environmentalist authors were: Erich Fromm (3), Robert Jungk (3), Al
Gore (3) and Konrad Lorenz (2). The Ecologist magazine was mentioned twice, another
magazine - Resurgence - once. James Lovelock, E.F. Schumacher, Peter Singer, Herbert
Marcuse and K. G. Jungk each appeared once, along with another two well-known books
The Limits to Growth and Factor 4. The only three Czech authors, who gained
recognition among the respondents were Jan Keller (4) and Hana Librová (4) (both taught
sociology at Brno university at the time of the interviews) and Erazim Kohák (2), a
professor of philosophy from the United States, who returned for his retirement to the
Czech Republic. The strong representation of philosophy and psychology corresponds
with the belief of many activists in the decisive role of individuals’ consciousness. The
main thrust of Librová’s influential book [Librová, 1994] could be interpreted as
reaffirming the belief within the Czech environmental movement about the importance of
individual changes towards an environmentally less damaging lifestyle based on
voluntary modesty.
Our central finding here is that relatively little happened within the movement
during the 1990s to compensate for those traditions and influences that shaped western
environmentalism in the past and that were missing in the Czech case. It was quite
revealing that many respondents perceived with great suspicion, sometimes bordering on
outright rejection, the ideas of Hnutí DUHA, the only major Czech environmental group
that explicitly links environmental issues with their social and political dimension. For
the majority of our respondents, current attitudes seem strongly linked to ideas from the
1980s, so we thought it necessary to go back to earlier sources to check whether their
recollections were directing our attention to significant past events.
10
Tramps, Brontosauri and Pollution Monitoring: Czech Environmental Knowledge
Interests of the Late 1980s
Drawing on our own memories of pre-1989 Czechoslovak environmentalism and on
historical literature [Vaněk 1996 and 2002; Kundrata, 1992], we present, in the rest of
this section, our interpretation of the knowledge interests of the late 1980s in relation to
the social and political context of the time. The pre-1989 traditions of the current Czech
environmental movement are mainly related to the activities of three officially recognised
organisations, ČSOP, Hnutí Brontosaurus and Ekologická sekce Biologické společnosti
Československé akademie věd (Ecological Section of the Biological Society of the
Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences) and an unofficial movement that was, nevertheless,
tolerated by the Communist authorities – tramping.
Tramping is a loose movement whose origin dates back to the period after the
First World War. Its origin is linked to the spread of American values and culture as
communicated through literature and westerns about the 19th century American West
[Waic and Koessl, 1992]. Tramping has gone through several major transformations.8
During the decades of Communism tramping enabled people to find refuge from
oppressive every-day reality with a group of like-minded friends in their log cabins or
camp sites.
Tramping and its culture, while nurturing positive attitudes to nature, perceived
nature in oppositional contrast to society as a refuge from society, thus separating the
social and the environmental. Tramping experience has also taught its adherents that it
was possible to lead a modest lifestyle with very limited means, at least for several
summer days or weeks. Despite the universal familiarity of Czechs with tramping’s
cultural dimension (music, jargon, and romantic literature), its social base was always
somewhat limited. Tramping appealed mainly to urban dwellers with a technical
orientation in terms of education and employment. It is estimated that up to 50,000
people were part of the movement in the 1980s.
Brontosaurus started in 1973 as a programme of the Socialist Union of Youth
aimed at ecological education and summer camps in which volunteers were engaged in
practical conservation work. ČSOP, established in 1979 as a successor of a similar
organisation called Tis (Yew) that was forced by authorities to disband itself, had a
similar range of activities as Brontosaurus. Although some local branches of these two
organisations had a more political agenda, in particular if they had links to Ekologická
sekce or even the dissident Ekologická společnost (Ecological Society), the majority of
the members were engaged in non-political activities called in the contemporary jargon
‘small ecology’. They were cleaning streams of rubbish, looking after protected areas,
disseminating knowledge on functioning of ecosystems and educating young people in
ecology in strictly scientific terms.
The only legal environmental organisation that perceived and discussed ‘big
ecology’ issues (decision making processes on strategic and politically charged issues)
was Ekologická sekce. This elitist expert organisation (which had 400 members at its
peak in 1989) evolved from a group of friends and colleagues, most of whom held jobs in
various institutes of the Academy of Sciences. Employment in the Academy meant that
they enjoyed privileged access to environmental data, most of which were treated by the
regime as secret information. Scientific expertise, access to data and the links of some of
11
the Section’s members to the dissident Charta ’779
made it the most influential and
respected group of the Czech environmental movement prior to 1989. Ekologická sekce’s
interpretation of environmental issues was by and large confined to domestic issues – to
the visible impacts of local industrial pollution that was deemed to have a detrimental
effect on human health. The international dimension of environmental problems was
recognised only in the form of transboundary effects of air and water pollution, while the
global dimension was almost absent.
The key feature of the pre-1989 environmental debate was that ‘environmental
problems were primarily viewed through the twin lenses of science and technology’
[Tickle and Welsh, 1998: 157]. If the environmental movement wanted to enter a
dialogue with the authorities, it had to comply with the scientific, technical, rational,
apolitical and value-free interpretation of environmental issues. This type of reasoning
did not contradict the official ideology of social advancement based on scientifictechnological
progress. The key battle was then about gaining access to the data, which
would enable the environmental movement to mount more effective scientific arguments
in communication with the authorities.
However, the only causes of environmental problems that could be voiced were
temporary and asystemic failures of Communist economic management. The solution to
environmental problems rested in better scientific understanding and required better
monitoring and application of a less damaging technology. This line of argument was
supposed eventually to persuade the authorities to enforce the already existing regulations
based on the emissions reduction principle and to install end-of-pipe devices. In the
understanding of many Czech environmentalists this was an approach that resolved
problems of environmental pollution in west European countries in the 1970s and early
1980s.
Czech environmentalism of the late 1980s was a curious blend of the officially
sanctioned moderate current of rational, technocratic and scientific (ecological)
perception of environmental issues with the unofficial romanticising undercurrent
extolling virtues such as beauty of pristine nature and individual freedom. While in the
specific social and political context of the Communist period, this intellectual amalgam
amounted to a mildly rebellious protest current, from western environmentalism’s point
of view it represented a politically and socially conservative shade of environmentalism.
Whereas western environmentalism emerged at least partly as a new-left related
counterculture, Czech environmentalism represented a moderate counterculture to the
real ‘existing socialism’ and politically leaned to the right or centre rather than left. As
Vaněk [2002: 250] concludes ‘(f)ears of repression and dislike for leftwing views gave
rise to a particular type of the Czech environmentalist: a cautious person with the ideal of
tolerance and democracy and of mild and placid nature’.
In his socio-anthropological analysis of post-1989 Czech society, Holy [1996: 5]
argues that the discourses which emerged in a situation of dramatic social change brought
about by the post-Communist transformation of society either have explicitly invoked
discourses current in pre-Communist Czech society or have been constructed in
conscious opposition to the official discourses current during the Communist period. It
should be added that both types of discourse were already constructed before 1989.
Furthermore, part of the oppositional discourse was based on juxtaposing the realities of
the Communist period with perceptions of the western liberal democracies. As Vaněk
12
[2002: 250] reminds us, ‘ecological damage in Czechoslovakia was perceived as a
consequence of the centrally planned socialist system. Czech environmentalists saw the
capitalist system and market economy as their hope’. Not surprisingly, therefore, a
number of movement intellectuals found it initially difficult to comprehend that the
arrival of the market and liberal democracy did not automatically lead to the reversal of
detrimental approaches to the environment.
I was really taken by surprise when after the revolution, politicians and
economists were attacking the ecological movement, in particular Václav Klaus in
1992 and 1993. It became a sort of dichotomy, in fact economic arguments were
used against the nature protectionists (INTERVIEW 11/2/99).
(I)n 1990, we did nothing against (the construction of the nuclear power plant)
Temelín. We thought: There is a new government, the government of our heart,
democratic, and they will certainly close Temelín down. But a year passed and
nothing happened, so we got a bit angry and decided to do something against it
(INTERVIEW 20/1/99).
The Continuity of Czech Environmental Knowledge Interests
What makes Czech environmental knowledge interests of the late 1990s distinctly
different from those in the West is not something that the Czech movement has in
addition to them, but precisely what is missing in comparison to western
environmentalism. Not only had the environmental movement under state socialism a
shorter tradition, as Herrschel and Forsyth [2001] point out, but it developed under
constraints that were not experienced by their western counterparts. As a consequence,
important pre-1990s influences informing the movement’s knowledge interests in the
West were not part of the Czech environmental movement’s experience.
Our central argument in this section is that the interaction of the Czech
environmental movement with western actors during the 1990s had relatively little effect
in terms of compensating for these missing formative experiences. As opposed to
changes at the practical organisational level, such as professionalisation and fundraising
techniques, changes at the deeper, cognitive level were relatively minor and, as a
consequence, the Czech environmental movement has retained many features of the pre-
1989 ‘Czech local perspective’. We support this claim by proceeding in two steps. First,
we argue that western involvement in transformation of the Czech environmental
movement did not significantly enrich the deeper cognitive dimension of the movement
as it usually refrained from this activity. Second, we argue that there were considerable
barriers for the Czech environmental movement intellectuals to evolve interest in
broadening and deepening its cognitive dimension by catching up with the past sources of
western environmentalism. Apart from the specific formative experience of movement
intellectuals described earlier in this article a major barrier was the domestic transitional
political context during much of the 1990s.
13
The nature of western involvement
The demise of the Communist system in CEE broadly coincided with the culmination of
the most significant shift of the western environmental governance over the last 30 years,
characterised by Bernstein [2000] as convergence of environmental and economic norms
towards ‘liberal environmentalism’. As Bernstein argues further, in the form of the
concept of sustainable development, the 1992 Earth Summit institutionalised these
norms, which predicate environmental protection on the promotion and maintenance of
liberal economic order. This was the approach which western agencies, whether
governmental or non-governmental started to promote in CEE following the initial
meeting of the ‘Environment for Europe’ process in the Dobříš castle near Prague in June
1991. This was later further strengthened by the process of harmonisation of policies and
laws in the applicant countries for membership in the European Union (EU).
Since the beginning, western management of the process of transition in the
environmental field [Slocock, 1999: 155] and western environmental assistance have
relied for their implementation on the involvement of environmental NGOs. The
argument that was usually invoked was that strengthening environmental NGOs brings
double benefit; apart from enhancing environmental protection it also strengthens
democracy through the development of the prime actor of civil society. However, as
Pearce [1998] explains in the case of the 1990s’ process of capitalist modernisation in
Central America, democracy was not perceived by external assistance actors so much as
an outcome as a means of achieving economic development. It was East European
revolutions which gave the concept of civil society a great respectability and pitched it
against the authoritarian and interventionist state. Civil society became a concept that
links the strategy of marketisation with political liberalisation. The attractiveness of civil
society lies in the notion that it mirrors in the political realm the principles of selfregulation
understood to be the source of economic well-being and growth [Pearce, 1998:
184]. Civil society is supposed to be a means of reconciling problems arising from the
introduction of the market economy. In this context environmental NGOs’ role as civil
society actors is to mediate in conflicts arising from the impact of economic development
on the environment.
In the Czech Republic, as elsewhere in CEE, the emphasis of western assistance
was initially placed on training programmes for environmental activists with the
objective of transferring knowledge and practice from the West to CEE. As Lipschutz
[1996: 156-157] found in the Hungarian case, the training programmes of US agencies,
whether government or private and non-profit, did not aim at teaching environmental
groups about ecology, but concentrated on transferring the organisational culture of US
civil society and the US environmental community in particular. Later the focus of
foreign assistance shifted to grant funding of NGOs’ projects. Partly as a result of foreign
assistance, the Czech environmental movement failed to develop its own membership
base and became almost fully dependent on external funding. Funders, whether private
foundations, western governments or various EU intermediaries, wanted to see tangible
results of their assistance. Hence they typically funded: public ecological libraries and
their networking; ecological counselling for the public; participation of environmental
groups in environmental decision-making processes, in particular through the EIA
process; strengthening the co-operation of environmental groups with state authorities
14
and local governments; collecting information (e.g. mapping installations of renewable
energy in a region); publications of information brochures and leaflets (rarely publication
of books, either original or translated); drafting policy proposals; and projects on nature
conservation (applied ecology). In short these are activities that can be, borrowing from
Waller [1998: 41-42], best described as ‘integrative’ and ‘issue-raising’ rather than
contributing to broadening the movement’s worldviews, substantive knowledge and
analytical skills.10
Many concepts promoted in the Czech Republic by western agencies in the 1990s
conformed to practices to which the Czech environmental movement was accustomed in
its pre-1989 experience. The importance of scientific competence and expertise, for
which availability of data was crucial, was deeply familiar. Consultative, moderate and
rational behaviour of the environmental movement in its co-operative relationship with
other actors was also reminiscent of past practices. Similarly deeply entrenched in the
Czech environmentalists’ conscience was the belief in education, dissemination of
information and resulting changes of lifestyle as the most effective means of achieving a
more harmonious relationship between society and nature. The message of western actors
that positive change can be achieved through changes at the individual level without the
need for a major structural change resonated with views held by Czech environmentalists
too. The earlier association with environmental reform predicated on systemic change
should not be seen as a contradiction. The belief in the necessity to replace Communism
by liberal capitalism as a precondition for the improvement of the environment was not
based on a deep structural analysis of the two social systems, but on the perceived
‘unnaturalness’ of the former and ‘naturalness’ of the latter.11
Transitional political context
After the short revolutionary ‘movement politics’ period 1990 – 1991, major political
parties started to pursue the goal of ‘stabilisation’ of democracy. This effectively meant
the attempt to close the political system to all political actors other than large political
parties. This policy was particularly targeting environmental groups that, despite their
embrace of the market economy and belief in the role of individual consumers in
achieving their goals, were deemed by political parties to represent the main threat to the
doctrine of unfettered economic growth stimulated by the introduction of the free market
and privatisation. Furthermore, the attempts of some environmental groups to open the
environmental policy-making sector to civil society actors, although still mainly on
grounds of scientific and rational argumentation, were at odds with the tendency to
perceive this policy sector as basically technical and the domain of experts.
What was particularly detrimental to the environmental movement’s reputation in
the eyes of both the media and the political elite, whether on the left or right of the
political spectrum, was the association of their activities and arguments with emotions
and the ‘unnatural’. Holy observes that in Czech conceptualisation ‘emotions’ connote an
unsuitable or inappropriate expression of feelings. The word ‘emotion’ acquires its
meaning in opposition to ‘reason’. Particularly in political rhetoric, politicians, political
commentators, and ordinary people commenting on political events and decisions
condemn as irresponsible the appeal to emotions by extremists, both ultra-left-wing and
15
ultra-right-wing populists, and they negatively evaluate ‘emotional solutions to problems’
and ‘emotional answers to complex questions’ [Holy 1996: 181 – 182].
However moderate Czech environmental groups were during the 1990s in their
behaviour, their goals and arguments were still questioning the dominant social paradigm
of the transitional period – development, economic growth and catching-up with western
countries in terms of levels of affluence – and hence were seen as questioning the
‘natural’. This experience also strengthened the apolitical character of most Czech
environmental movement intellectuals and their increased use of scientific rationality and
technical expertise. Czech environmental groups were making a considerable effort to
present themselves and to behave as not only independent of political parties, but also as
actors who consciously avoid any possible association with all types of vested political,
economic and ideological interests.
Conclusion
Although we have discovered a great deal of affinity between the knowledge interests of
Czech environmental movement intellectuals and 1990s liberal environmentalism, we
argue that this is not solely due to the western influences shaping the thought of Czech
movement intellectuals. Rather than the western ideational paradigm replacing the local
perspective, a more complex combination of domestic and imported ideas occurred in the
course of the 1990s. With its emphasis on civil society, access to information and the role
of lifestyle changes, western knowledge transfer in the 1990s was largely compatible
with the Czech pre-1989 oppositional environmental discourse.
By stressing the importance of influences that originated during the Communist
period for the cognitive dimension of Czech environmentalism in the late 1990s, we wish
to contribute to the growing body of literature that interprets post-Communist
transformation as a ‘mix of inherited experiences of socialism and western-inspired
aspirations’ [Herrschel, 2001]. This literature [e.g. Herrschel and Forsyth, 2001; Pavlínek
and Pickles, 2000]) argues that post-Communism is in many respects a unique condition
and the impact of western influence has been less far-reaching than previously thought.
Czech attitudes consistent with liberal environmentalism did not originate in
1990s western influence but in predispositions with a much longer history. This seems to
us a vindication of Jamison’s approach, with its sensitivity to local specificities and
political style, even in times of much closer international and even global linkages. The
fact that Czech movement intellectuals display exactly the tension that Jamison [2000]
identifies – between a dominant positivist instrumental rationality and a weaker cultural
and hermeneutic rationality – suggests that they, like us, need to pay more attention to
oppositional voices if environmentalism is not to become merely the voice of green
business.
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NOTES
1
Czech acronym for Independent Social-Ecological Movement.
2
To identify our respondents we used the ‘purposeful sample’ technique [Overton and
van Diermen, 2003].
3
More than three quarters of respondents took this position.
4
The English word ‘tramping’ is actually used in the Czech language to describe this
distinctively Czech cultural form.
5
Given the age of our respondents, only a few of them could actually have been members
of boy scouts, as during the Communist period boy scouting was legally allowed only
between 1968 and 1970.
6
Foglar’s books were removed from public libraries during the Communist regime
except for the 1968 - 1970 period.
7
A telling story is related to the publishing of a semi-official Czech translation of ‘Limits
to Growth’ shortly after its publication in the West. Bedřich Moldan, a leading figure of
Ekologická sekce and later the first Czech Republic’s post-Communist environment
minister, who was mainly responsible for this act, bitterly recalled in an interview for
Nová přítomnost monthly at the beginning of the 1990 that this effort had no impact on
Czech environmental discourse as it met with no response.
8
Associated initially with the process of modernization of Czech society, tramping
provided a temporary escape from constraints of the urban, bureaucratic and industrial
society. Thus in the 1920 and 1930s it was a moderate protest movement and an
alternative lifestyle to bourgeois society.
9
Politically, the most controversial act of Ekologická sekce was the leaking of the
government commissioned Report on the State of the Environment in Czechoslovakia to
the dissident group Charta ’77 and its publication in the western media in 1984.
10
An example of foreign assistance that partly aimed to extend knowledge and ideas of
CEE environmental movements is the activity of Quebec-Labrador Foundation (for
details see Carmin et al. [2003]).
11
Holy [1996] offers an insightful explanation of the superior standing of capitalism to
Communism in Czech perception in the early 1990s. According to Holy, in the Czech
conceptualisation, things are perceived either as having emerged naturally, or as the result
of deliberate human design. The evolution of human society and of its specific
institutions is itself seen as ‘natural’ in the sense that these institutions cannot be
attributed to particular human agents as their conscious or deliberate creations. The
market economy is seen as ‘natural’ because ‘nobody created it’ [Holy 1996: 180]. The
19
market economy is seen as superior to the planned Communist economy, as natural
things often have a higher value than those deliberately created.