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THE GREEN AGENDA

  • 27/02/2000

Employment through ecological innovation: The guidelines of this programme involves sustainability, social justice, democracy, citizen rights and equal rights for women. In the centre is a package of measures to combat mass unemployment by creating new jobs through ecological innovation over the next four years. A policy of reduced working hours it was felt should lead to a basis for fair distribution of gainful employment as well as housework, child-rearing and nursing care, to allow women and men a share in paid work, sufficient to support themselves and their families. Shedding overtime, shortening weekly, yearly and lifetime working-time, effective support for part-time models, for older employees and young people starting out on their career, and promotion of part-time jobs for men and women on all rungs of the qualification ladder are an integral part of this concept.

No to nuclear power: In this framework, withdrawal from nuclear power was to be notified in an Anti-Nuclear Power Act. The purpose was to step by step close all nuclear power plants, stop reprocessing and the plutonium industry, and ban any export of nuclear waste especially via surface transport, mainly rail. The political approach would be to develop a consensus on this withdrawal together with the German energy industry, to avoid legal action for damage claims. This would be the case, if the plants were simply expropriated or shut down by the state. The compensation costs were estimated in the dimension of a two-figure number of billions of German marks. To avoid these astronomical financial consequences, discussions are on to allow a period of approximately two-and-a-half decade for phasing out all nuclear power plants. However, it is clear that there will be an Anti-Nuclear Power Act if the industry is not willing to accept a reasonable consensus solution.

More civil rights and less bureaucracy: Germany was one of the few countries in the world, which had a so-called "blood-oriented' citizenship. Meaning, anybody who had ancestors of German origin could almost automatically get the German citizenship, no matter where the person was born and brought up. On the other hand, everybody who was born on German territory by parents with no German citizenship would not get it automatically. The person would have to apply as an adult in a complicated bureaucratic procedure and under the condition that the original citizenship would be given away. So, the major objective of the Green reform policy in this field was that anyone who had been living for a long time in Germany or was born there, should be entitled to a German citizenship. However, integration of first-generation and second-generation migrants under a German citizenship could not succeed without solving the issues involving a double citizenship.

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