Abstract
From a German-German Bargain to the Creation of an Environmental Problem in the 1980s In the 1970s, West Berlin started to transport its waste to East-German dumpsites. By the 1980s, Hamburg and other West German municipalities had followed suit, depositing their waste in Schönberg landfill, a waste disposal site situated in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) barely five kilometers from the German-German border. What began as an inner-German agreement with benefits for both sides soon developed into an environmental problem for the West German government. This article focuses on the strategies with which the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) tried to assuage critical voters and cope with a dumping ground at its border. It is argued that because of the demands for political action by the people living close to the dump the ‘greening’ of politics, which means the inclusion of environmental concerns on the political agenda, produced ambiguous results.
Highlights
In March 1986, The Economist published a commentary entitled ‘Rubbish between Germans’, which concluded that West German ecologists were hard to satisfy (1 March 1986: 46)
Art. 1, page 5 of 10 had risen to 900,000 tons, including 100,000 tons from Western European countries other than the Federal Republic (Der Spiegel 8/1986: 52). In allowing these delegations access that they denied their own citizens, German Democratic Republic (GDR) officials—falsely—hoped to directly counteract West German media reports of the dumpsite by presenting Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) politicians with a positive image they could carry back to the Federal Republic (information about the visit of FRG-experts in Schönberg, 28 October 1983, BArch DL 266, Vol 1690: 85–91)
In 1983, the Green Party was elected into parliament for the first time, putting renewed pressure on the other parties and the federal and state governments in charge to stop the export of toxic waste
Summary
From a German-German Bargain to the Creation of an Environmental Problem in the 1980s. By the 1980s, Hamburg and other West German municipalities had followed suit, depositing their waste in Schönberg landfill, a waste disposal site situated in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) barely five kilometers from the German-German border. What began as an inner-German agreement with benefits for both sides soon developed into an environmental problem for the West German government. This article focuses on the strategies with which the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) tried to assuage critical voters and cope with a dumping ground at its border. It is argued that because of the demands for political action by the people living close to the dump the ‘greening’ of politics, which means the inclusion of environmental concerns on the political agenda, produced ambiguous results
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