ABSTRACT
During its founding period, the Greens’ policy of opposition to the existing social structure, especially to certain ecological problems, and to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) decision on cruise and Pershing missiles served the party as central cohesive elements. By 1982, when the state governments in Hessen and Hamburg were unable to govern with a clear majority without the cooperation of the Greens, certain splits in party unity had come to the surface. As with all movements forced to base their policies on something other than pure negativism, the different ideological views of the party’s component parts became visible. Until then they had frequently been concealed as had the fact that the Greens were a mixture of critics of capitalism and “conservative” critics of society and that these differing attitudes were at times patched together with great difficulty using theories of a “third way” between capitalism and communism. Clear differentiations between the various groups are difficult to make because their outlines are fluid. Nevertheless, four distinct groups emerge as of 1984: the “red-Greens,” the “Green-red realists,” the reform ecologists, and the fundamental oppositionists.
