Making Green Germany: The Emergence of Climate Politics amidst German Reunification and the Post-Cold War Transformation of Europe

• Applicant: Dr. Stephen Milder
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 423371999

This research project will study how efforts to mitigate anthropogenic climate change gained political currency in the reunified Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) during the 1990s. It will consider how the end of the Cold War and German Reunification shaped the emergence of climate change as a political issue, but also examine the influence of climate politics on reunified Germany. The project will depart from existing scholarship, which describes climate change as a unique problem and thus rarely considers its relationship to mainstream politics, by considering the myriad ways in which climate politics were entangled in German reunification and Europe’s post-Cold War transformation.The perceived separation between climate change and the political mainstream is underpinned by interpretations of climate change that describe it as a set of technical puzzles. Collectively, these puzzles are said to comprise a “wicked problem,” that could nonetheless be solved using highly specific, well-engineered “solutions.” This project will challenge that understanding by showing that the climate politics promoted by the FRG immediately after the Cold War were neither separate technical solutions nor radical attempts to “change everything” in order to solve the world’s most complicated problem—they were part of essential political debates in reunified Germany. The project will study three transformations that re-shaped post-Cold War Europe in order to find and analyze the links between climate politics and high politics: (1) the expansion and entrenchment of liberal democracy and neo-liberal economics after the end of Communism, (2) the creation of new identities after the end of German (and European) division, and (3) the re-conception of technology amidst the transformation of Cold War Big Science. Using archival sources and oral history interviews, the project will conduct four case studies: (1) the acceptance of market-based solutions to environmental problems embodied by the widespread support for the idea of a green economy, (2) the changing conception of citizenship and participation evident in the encouragement of private energy production through Feed-in-Tariff legislation, (3) the importance of climate diplomacy as a forum for international leadership and a basis for a new German identity, and (4) the association of decentralized, small-scale renewable energy production with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as promoted by independent research institutes.By studying post-Cold War era climate politics in the FRG, this project will help us to see how climate change became not only a salient issue, but also part of mainstream politics in the 1990s. Thus, the project will also further a broader re-conception of environmental history that better links the study of the environmental concerns with “mainstream” social and political problems.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants