174 FRANK UEKÖTTER
largest consumer boycott of postwar Germany, the campaign failed to
take stock of the many causes of the worrisome state of the North Sea,
many of which were more troublesome than Brent Spar.^112 The 1990s
were also marked by an internet and high-tech euphoria that made envi-
ronmental concerns look strangely old-fashioned by way of comparison.
The environmental movement disintegrated into a broad range of con-
cerns in the 1990s. On the one end of the spectrum, there were entrepre-
neurial manifestos in favor of an “environmentally-friendly social market
economy.”^113 At the other end, heavily annotated eco-feminist books
trumpeted the joint struggle against capitalism, patriarchy, and the con-
trol of nature, majestically emerging from the toil of everyday politics.^114
Disintegration had its limits, and the Fundi and Realo factions within the
Green Party found ways to work with each other, but sometimes com-
munication collapsed altogether. The nuclear phase-out of the red-green
government drew vigorous protests from hard-core anti-nuclear activists,
and no words could heal the divide until Merkel sought to renegotiate the
agreement in 2010.
So what does one make of the red-green federal government that came
into offi ce in 1998? It was both a fi tting conclusion of history and a mys-
tery, and the latter had a lot to do with lukewarm scholarly interest. While
the early Greens were virtually fl ooded with academic attention, their
seven years in power have not been studied to a satisfactory degree.^115 In
a book that focuses on the legacy of the two German states, it is crucial
to recognize that Gerhard Schröder’s government was an eminently West
German aff air. The cooperation between the Social Democrats and the
Green Party was an idea that emerged in a specifi c West German con-
text in the 1980s, and these coalitions never took root in East German
states, apart from the minority government that was briefl y formed in
Saxony-Anhalt and disappeared after one term. In Schröder’s fi rst cab-
inet, Christine Bergmann (Ministry for Family, Senior Citizens, Women
and Youth) was the only minister who had grown up in East Germany.
In the 1980s, the red-green coalition nurtured great hopes for a com-
prehensive ecological modernization project. The Schröder government
soon looked more modest by way of comparison.^116 Continuities pre-
vailed in the institutions and tools of environmental policy. For example,
while the red-green government expanded support for renewable energy
sources, it stuck to the general approach that the federal government had
embraced with a law of 1990 (Einspeisegesetz).^117 Even the government’s
anti-nuclear stance is best understood as part of a long farewell to nu-
clear power in Germany: not a single reactor project got off the ground
since reunifi cation. Even East German states, otherwise desperate for
investors, showed no appetite for new nuclear projects in the 1990s.^118