Modular Ideology: a Green Caterpillar Turns into a Colourful Butterfly?

Abstract

From a British perspective, the 1996 elections centred upon the modernised Labour lead by Tony Blair. Blair’s agenda, based on Gidden’s thesis of The Third Way,¹ appealed particularly to those groups and ideas that the Greens had also targeted. In Germany the separation from socialism occurred in 1956, and led to the independent paths of the SPD and the Greens. In Britain, the socialist clause 4 was removed only in 1996, and the changing agenda of New Labour seemed to address the same structural problems of advanced industrial democracies that New Politics did. It was therefore necessary for the BGP in 1996 to reiterate the distinctly ecological agenda, rather than to market a new worldview of social justice, which was too similar to that of the main party contesting power.