Environment and Transition in Eastern Europe

Abstract

In the past few decades environmental concern has become an increasingly important economic and political issue. It has mobilized scientific innovation, spawned hundreds of international treaties, stimulated the development of new technologies, and created new regulations and agencies (O’Riordan, 1995). It also played a role in the demise of the Soviet system in eastern Europe. Among the issues the socialist system was unable to address, the deteriorating state of the environment was one of the most striking. Many of the green movements that emerged in the 1980s were connected with the political drive for democracy and independence (Massam and Earl-Goulet, 1997). Environmental issues played the role of political ammunition in the sense that unsatisfied demands for an improved environmental situation fuelled demands for general political and economic changes. In Slovakia, the Slovak Union of Landscape and Nature Protection was virtually the only important current of opposition before 1989 (Jehlicka and Kostelecky, 1992). The political dimension of environmental affairs was evident in cases such as the Hungarian protests against the construction of the.Gabcikovo-Nagymaros dam on the Danube river¹ (Fitzmaurice, 1996), Estonian protests against phosphorite mining (Salay, 1991), Lithuanian manifestations against the Ignalina nuclear power station,² the attempts to improve the air quality situation in the Bulgarian town Ruse³ (Baumgartl, 1997), the popular protests in Armenia against the Medzamor nuclear power plant and the Nairit Chemical Factory (Dawson, 1995) and, most importantly, the 1986 nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl which more than any environmental event in the 1980s undermined Soviet authority in eastern Europe.⁴