Environmentalism under Authoritarian Regimes

Myth, Propaganda, Reality

Stephen Brain, Viktor Pál

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351007047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Since the early 2000s, authoritarianism has risen as an increasingly powerful global phenomenon. This shift has not only social and political implications, but also environmental implications: authoritarian leaders seek to recast the relationship between society and the government in every aspect of public life, including environmental policy. When historians of technology or the environment have investigated the environmental consequences of authoritarian regimes, they have frequently argued that authoritarian regimes have been unable to produce positive environmental results or adjust successfully to global structural change, if they have shown any concern for the environment at all. Put another way, the scholarly consensus holds that authoritarian regimes on both the left and the right generally have demonstrated an anti-environmentalist bias, and when opposed by environmentalist social movements, have succeeded in silencing those voices.

This book explores the theme of environmental politics and authoritarian regimes on both the right and the left. The authors argue that in instances when environmentalist policies offer the possibility of bolstering a country's domestic (nationalist) appeal or its international prestige, authoritarian regimes can endorse and have endorsed environmental protective measures. The collection of essays analyzes environmentalist initiatives pursued by authoritarian regimes, and provides explanations for both the successes and failures of such regimes, looking at a range of case studies from a number of countries, including Brazil, China, Poland, and Zimbabwe. The volume contributes to the scholarly debate about the social and political preconditions necessary for effective environmental protection.

This book will be of great interest to those studying environmental history and politics, environmental humanities, ecology, and geography.

1 Introduction

Stephen Brain and Viktor Pál

Environmental protection and classical liberalism have a complicated relationship. Economic liberalism (in the form of free-market capitalism) and political liberalism (in the form of participatory democracy) share an emphasis on personal freedom, a respect for the individual, and a trust in the informed judgment of responsible citizens. Over the past five hundred years, these two forms of liberalism have facilitated, and in turn drawn popular support from, dramatic economic growth—therefore increasing tremendously the pressure on the environment. As a result, the most common and effective efforts to enhance environmental quality have focused on enacting laws that decrease the autonomy of individual actors and increase the power of the state to prescribe suitable behaviors. National parks, clean air acts, endangered species laws, and similar initiatives restrict the freedom of citizens and corporations by setting limits on their liberty to exploit the environment as they see fit.¹ The tight link between environmental protection and centralized government control has led critics on the right to liken environmentalists to watermelons—“green on the outside and red on the inside.”² Anti-environmentalist protest movements in the United States, such as the Sagebrush Rebellion or the Bundy Standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, frequently challenge the government’s prerogative to set environmental standards, or the right of the government to own land at all.³ In short, environmentalists and anti-environmentalists alike identify state authority as a central factor, and often the primary factor, capable of curbing the freedom of environmental actors. They only disagree about whether such curbs are appropriate.

Scholars studying environmental issues, although rarely adopting a stridently anti-environmental approach, have often appraised environmentalist initiatives in ways broadly consonant with anti-environmentalist protest. One prominent path leading in this direction is what might be called the “dark green” critique, in which scholars contend that environmental protection, unwittingly or otherwise, has served to reinforce existing power disparities.⁴ In the dark green critique, national parks have displaced indigenous and other subaltern peoples; environmental limits on economic activity impose costs borne mainly by the relatively powerless; and developing countries (or “backward” segments of a population) are dispossessed for environmental reasons.⁵ From this perspective, the state can be a dangerous force working for the benefit of the powerful, always holding the potential to crush dissidents and subalterns, and observers must remain vigilant so that state authority remains within proper bounds. One of the most influential books in this vein is James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.⁶ Scott contends that bureaucratic regimes, generally speaking, aim to organize their societies according to the technocratic principles of “high modernism,” failing to take local knowledge, or mētis, into account, thereby dooming their projects to failure and their societies to oppression. To be fair to Scott, it is incorrect to label him as a classical laissez-faire liberal. He noted in an online symposium dedicated to Seeing Like a State that, in his view, “large scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state, with the difference that, for capitalists, simplification must pay.”⁷ Despite this caveat, Scott’s main contentions are clear: that centralized planning tends toward a dangerous form of simplification, and that the multifarious crowd can devise better solutions than trained experts. Commenters have critiqued Scott for his propensity to interpret historical episodes tendentiously; one such critic, Russell Hardin, noted that the central problem in one of Scott’s key case studies, Soviet agricultural collectivization, was “a failure of incentives, not a failure to rely on local knowledge.”⁸ Despite these objections, Scott’s deeply liberal celebration of local knowledge and individual autonomy, resonant with prevailing Western attitudes toward personal liberty, helped fashion a widely encountered trope in recent environmental history and environmental geography that makes egalitarian subjectivity, rather than the relationship between humans and the natural world, the primary consideration.⁹

The tendency among Western scholars to associate praiseworthy environmental policy with liberalism and individualism is also discernible in the extant environmental histories about authoritarian regimes. Although the environmental policies of smaller authoritarian countries have basically gone unstudied, the available environmental analyses of powerful authoritarian countries such as the USSR, communist China, and Nazi Germany most often focus on negative aspects while casting positive developments in the darkest possible light or omitting them entirely, frequently positing the lack of democratic input into the decision-making process as a key factor.¹⁰ Perhaps this trend is most notable with respect to the country with the best developed environmental historiography, the Soviet Union. The earliest studies dedicated to Soviet environmental policy adopted a measured tone and identified structural problems that resulted in environmental problems, but in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, a much more strident approach emerged, centered on Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly’s Ecocide in the USSR.¹¹ Feshbach and Friendly contended not only that environmental degradation in the Soviet Union exceeded that in other countries, but that the damage done was intentional, hence the term “ecocide,” echoing the word homicide.¹² The “ecocide thesis” came to dominate the scholarly discussion about Soviet environmental quality such that it entered general textbooks about Soviet history:

The rush to modernity … meant that attention was paid almost exclusively to output and productivity and almost no notice was taken of the impact of rapid industrialization on the natural environment. This insensitivity to the limits of nature was characteristic of capitalist industrialization as well, but in the Soviet Union general ecological ignorance was compounded by the bravado of the Communists, who looked upon nature simply as an obstacle to be overcome on the road to progress.¹³

Although made specifically in reference to the Soviet Union, such a conclusion reflects the tenor of most Western scholarly investigations of authoritarian environmental politics: rarely providing specific comparisons with environmental conditions in contemporaneous liberal societies, but nevertheless confident in asserting that illiberal regimes are quantitatively more damaging and philosophically hostile to the environment.

In contrast, this volume takes as its points of departure that illiberal societies have developed environmentalist policies of their own, that environmentalism is a protean ideology, and that the sets of structures and priorities prevailing in the West represent only some of many possibilities.¹⁴ The essays presented here present two alternative explanations for this phenomenon. The first of these observes that because environmentalism, despite its reputation as a left-leaning political movement, is motivated by a powerful expert-driven, conservative impulse to preserve the world as it is now or restore it to an earlier state, illiberal governments find certain environmentalist policies attractive. Alternatively, the second rationale rejects the sharp distinction often encountered in scholarly analyses between authoritarian governments and the societies from which they spring, and draws examples from illiberal governments implementing ideas informed by popular ideas about nature that might not immediately seem environmentalist to a Western reader. This volume seeks to demonstrate that environmentalism is not a political movement associated with one end of the ideological spectrum, and that authoritarian forms of environmentalism deserve an impartial assessment.

In the opening essay, Jawad Daheur examines the case of a nineteenth-century authoritarian state, that of Hohenzollern Prussia, and finds that the elite’s self-assigned role of defending the public good compelled them to abandon their laissez-faire approach to the economy and take control of Prussian reforestation. State officials believed that, left to their own devices, neither Prussian landowners nor yeoman farmers were capable of maintaining the necessary long-term perspective, and thus embarked on a program of mandatory afforestation and land expropriation in places where land shortages militated against forest growth. In some cases, this inflamed ethnic tensions and gave rise to separatist sentiment, but the growing Prussian faith in technocratic paternalism gave rise to a burgeoning forest bureaucracy capable of stopping and then reversing the trend toward deforestation in the early nineteenth century.

In Chapter 3, Tony Andersson analyzes the complex environmental history of the Petén region of northern Guatemala. This heavily forested green corridor has been used for various purposes, including conservation, during Guatemala’s decades-long civil war. Andersson focuses on the very difficult problem of conservation in areas such as the Petén, which are dominated by political instability and violence. When conservationist programs, developed in entirely different social and economic circumstances, were implemented in the Petén, they were appropriated by the Guatemalan military command and the Petén’s local elite, and then used against the rural peasant population. The misuse of the conservation agenda included the personal sale of officially protected natural resources, including valuable timber and locally produced illegal drugs. Andersson’s Guatemalan study resonates well with the economic and environmental history of the Chilean “Chicago Boys” discussed in Chapter 5. That is, when economic and environmental policy measures are borrowed from a different socioeconomic setting and implemented with partial or complete disregard to local conditions, the results are unpredictable if not plainly disastrous. Andersson’s study suggests that the human suffering and environmental misuse in the Petén could and should have been mitigated by foreign actors, particularly by the CIA, the government of the United States, and the Western conservation NGOs working with the Petén.

In the next chapter, Nathalia Capellini Carvalho de Oliveira and Carlos Gomez Florentin analyze the complicated environmental history of the Paraguayan and Brazilian joint megaproject, the Itaipu Dam. Developmentalism and symbolic prometheanism have been intertwined with the environmental history of the twentieth century, and megaprojects seemed to attract particular attention from authoritarian regimes. Autocrats used large-scale infrastructural undertakings as symbols of power, prosperity and modernity. Several of these projects, such as the White Sea Canal and the extensive system of Soviet era irrigation canals in Central Asia, were realized with the cost of extensive environmental degradation and human suffering. What Capellini Carvalho de Oliveira and Gomez Florentin illustrate in their chapter is a development story that begins like other megalomaniac infrastructural projects, but over time is derailed by a complex dialog of activist and local communities, international actors, and change within the state bureaucracy. The complex politicization of the Itaipu Dam again suggests that the relationships between the environment and society, even under a military government, are very complex.

In Chapter 5, Leonardo Valenzuela Pérez analyzes a perhaps even more nuanced economic-environmental discourse in Chile under Pinochet’s military junta. Despite the stark ideological and economic policy differences between right-wing and left-wing authoritarian regimes, the Chilean government’s approach to tackling air pollution problems in Quintero Bay show several similarities with the communist regimes analyzed in Chapters 7 through 10, especially the environmental history of East German air pollution. Despite similarities, the Chilean military junta’s economic and environmental policies were built on neoliberal principles driven by the “Chicago Boys,” a group of professionals educated at the University of Chicago who returned to their native Chile to serve in high-ranking administrative positions. The Chicago Boys advocated economic deregulation and free-market capitalism, values often associated with liberal democracies. In the case with the Chilean military junta, deregulation and non-intervention in environmental issues became the preferred environmental policy method, shifting the responsibility for environmental protection to private corporations. As was true for East Germany, insufficient funds led to disappointing results, but in the Chilean case, the political will at the elite level was missing.

In Chapter 6, Eunice Blavascunas and Agata Agnieszka Konczal analyze an intriguing environmentalist conflict in post-Communist Poland over the fate of the Białowieża forest. In Poland’s highly politicized environmental setting, political trends, religious beliefs and socioeconomic claims produced the confusing cacophony of voices, which Blavascunas and Konczal make legible by grouping them into similar functional roles, regardless of the familiar left-versus-right and green-versus-growth divides. Actors opposing the government’s environmentalist agenda were branded as enemies of the state and nation, and as representatives of hostile foreign interests. In contrast, conservationists identified themselves with the global ecological movement transcending national boundaries, and denying the nationalist logic exercised by the Polish government and state foresters. In this heated discourse, the European Union figures as a hostile, alien force, attacking Poland and the Polish people—at least according to some of the participating actors. Most interesting in this environmental controversy is that all sides are convinced of the sole legitimacy and correctness of their environmentalist agendas, although in this instance the positions they take have little to do with the actual conservation of the Białowieża Forest. Blavascunas and Konczal therefore underscore the protean quality of environmentalism and demonstrate that the relationship of environmentalism and authoritarianism is more complicated than is generally understood.

In Chapter 7, the volume’s first essay dedicated to a left-wing authoritarian regime, Jiří Janáč explores a complex environmental and technological history in a central European context by analyzing Czechoslovak water and soil improvement efforts under communism. Janáč points out that the Czechoslovak state agencies did not aim for the domination of land and water, but rather what they called a “harmonious” d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PART I: On the right
• PART II: On the left
• Index