Russia and Ukraine - Milieukontakt International

problems. Investment in upgrading heavy
industry, such as steel production, makes no
sense in a global market awash with steel,
and the money would have been better
spent elsewhere.
West is best?
One of the greatest disappointments of the
last decade has been the inability to avoid
replicating the West’s unsustainable consumption
patterns. Decades of living in an
‘economy of scarcity’ has created a public
hunger for the fruits of capitalism. People
want convenience products like disposable
nappies. They want Western cars and now
they want more roads. They want packa-
ging – and lots of it – if
only to make up for the
years they went without.
They want Mac-
Donald’s and Pizza Hut
to make them feel more
secure in being ‘closer
to the West’.
Against this backdrop,
the emerging environmental
movement has had a hard time
trying to persuade people to take a different
path. According to Dan Swartz, from the
ZHABA Collective, Hungary, ‘People in Central
and Eastern Europe have been waiting
fifty years for cola in throw-away aluminium
cans – it is very hard to just slap their
hands and tell them they can’t have that.’
New threats
Today, with their nuclear legacies and many
other historical environmental problems
still unresolved, the countries are faced
with new threats to their long-term sustainability.
Perhaps the greatest threats stem from their
desire to join the European Union. Environmentalists
are already warning that EU
accession will undermine democracy, by
‘People in Central and
Eastern Europe have
been waiting fifty years
for cola in throw-away
aluminium cans – it is
very hard to just slap
their hands and tell them
they can’t have that.’
transferring power to Brussels. Monetary
union will require further cuts in public
spending resulting in less social welfare and
higher unemployment. Since the EU favours
globalization and deregulation, EU
accession will force workers, communities
and governments to be even more competitive
in attracting investment by reducing
wage costs and taxes and anything else that
will encourage investment. The EU’s free
market doctrine favours the centralization
of production leading to increased transport
of goods and further environmental
burdens.
However, one of the greatest fears of environmentalists
is the destruction that the
EU’s agricultural policy
can wreak on
farming, especially in
Poland where most
farms are smallholdings.
These farms are
producing food using
largely sustainable
methods but are unlikely
to survive the
EU’s agricultural policy. ‘Just recently, our
Foreign Affairs Minister, Geremek,
announced that the number of people
employed in agriculture in Poland would
have to drop from 26 percent to 7 percent.
When asked whether this was an EU requirement,
he replied that it was Polish policy
– though I’m sure no one believed him,’
says Pawel Gluszynski, from Waste Prevention
Association, a Polish NGO. In addition,
the centralization of food production will
require the use of food preservation techniques,
through chemical additives, irradiation
or genetic engineering.
Despite the doom-laden messages of environmentalists
on impending EU accession,
there will be some benefits. The accession
countries will have to harmonize their laws
with those in Brussels. In many areas, this
will mean new legislation will need to be introduced
where none exists today – dioxin
standards on incinerator emissions, regulatory
control of genetic engineering technologies,
producer responsibility to tackle
post-consumer waste, to name but a few.
Moreover, if Central and Eastern European
governments fail to implement EU directives
or if EU standards are breached, NGOs
will be able to seek justice beyond their national
courts. They will be able to take their
governments to task in the European Court
of Justice and thereby shame them in an international
arena.
Where are the NGOs?
The last decade has seen an unprecedented
increase in the level of NGO activity in the
region. NGOs have come a long way, with
an infrastructure and expertise that many
southern European NGOs still lack. However,
this is a difficult climate for NGO
development given society’s disillusionment
with the free market and their distrust
in whatever vision anyone has to offer. This
makes building alliances with other societal
sectors particularly difficult. For example,
few scientists are prepared to break ranks
with their academic community and come
out in support of NGO demands. The trade
unions are too engrossed in trying to save
their jobs in what remains of the dinosaur
industries to even consider what common
agenda they could have with NGOs.
Although NGOs have come a long way in
their own development, they have not yet
managed to carry the public with them. A
particularly vivid example is an NGO transport
action in Silesia, Poland in the summer
of 1998, when activists occupied the site of
a proposed new motorway. Using tactics
developed by the UK’s ‘Reclaim the Streets’
activists, they buried themselves in tunnels,
chained themselves to trees and built tree
houses in the woods about to be felled.
• Milieukontakt Oost-Europa • 9