CIAO DATE: 9/07
Culture and Conflict: Volume 54 (Summer 2004)
While the literature on environmental security is becoming more and more abundant and is taking eclectic directions, this article proposes a critical evaluation of the theses on environmental security, especially those theses on conflicts linked with environmental degradation and suggests it would be relevant to consider the instrumental rather than causal function of environmental problems in triggering and nurturing political, sometimes violent, conflicts. Because the environment involves fundamental dimensions of national identity, nationalist and ecologist groups can use environmental insecurity to mobilize the population against a central government which is perceived as illegitimate or against a migrant population threatening culture and national identity. Two examples from the recent history of Central and Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia and Lithuania at the end of the 1980s, illustrate his hypothesis. In both cases, environmental problems creating great insecurity amongst the population were used by nationalist movements calling for autonomy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union to such a point that today we consider these « green » movements played an essential role in bringing down several European communist regimes.