Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Environmentalists, men and women alike, had considerably more success in translating their sentiments into electoral politics. At one level ‘environmentalism’ (a neologism dating from the Thirties) was indeed a new departure: the collective expression of middle-class fears about nuclear power stations and galloping urbanization, motorways and pollution. But the Green Movement in Europe would never have been so effective had it been just a footnote to the Sixties: well-heeled weekend Luddites in stone-washed natural fibres triangulating between their instincts and their interests. The longing for a more ‘natural’ world and the search for a personal politics of ‘authenticity’ had deep roots on both sides of the ideological divide, traceable to the Romantics and their horror at the depredations of early industrialism. By the early twentieth century both Left and Right had their cycling clubs, vegetarian restaurants, Wandervogel movements and ramblers, affiliated variously to socialist or nationalist dreams of emancipation and return.