Abstract
Out of the turbulence of the movement politics of the 1970s and the frustrations of the new left of the 1960s, the Greens emerged in 1980. The conventional wisdom was that they were a protest party whose heterogeneous alliance of activists would disintegrate sooner or later, leaving the established parties to pick up its moderate pieces. In the meantime, the nightmare of mainstream observers was that the Greens, challenging the foreign and domestic policy pillars of West German elite consensus, might destabilise the postwar ‘political miracle’ of a party system of moderate pluralism.
The Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) supported my field research in 1985 and 1996; Ball State University’s Alumni Office supported it in 1987. The interviews referred to in the text with Green deputies, staff assistants, party officials and activists (1985, n= 35; 1987, n= 31; and 1996, n= 39) would have not been possible without these grants.
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Notes and References
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Frankland, E.G. (1999). The Green Party’s Transformation: The ‘New Politics’ Party Grows up. In: Merkl, P.H. (eds) The Federal Republic of Germany at Fifty. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27488-8_12
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