EUROPEAN GREEN DEAL FROM A NEO-GRAMSCIAN PERSPECTIVE: A CASE OF GREEN TRASFORMISMO

2024-3
DURMAZ, GÜNSELİ
“This is Europe's ‘man on the moon' moment” is what Von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, said to highlight the historic significance of the European Green Deal (EGD) for the European unification project in 2019, right before the COVID-19, two years after President Trump pulled the US from the Paris Agreement. In the apparent absence of the US in the formation and application of international climate policies against the global climate crisis, the EU has come forward for the role of climate leadership. This thesis problematizes why the EU has emerged as the leader while there are other international actors like US and China who have displayed a similar the ambition to green their production and consumption modes. It utilizes, develops, and expands from the Neo-Gramscian arguments on the green trasformismo of capitalism to understand how and why the EGD has become the policy priority of the European Union from the perspective of European integration process. It makes a qualitative content analysis of the documents of major EU institutions (European Commission, European Council, the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament), the European Round Table for Industry, the European Trade Union Confederation, Green10 and Eurobarometers. By qualitatively analyzing 968 such documents, it argues that via the EGD, the EU has been pursuing green trasformismo strategies to curb the radical potentials of the environmentalist social forces on the one hand, and to gain a hegemonic position over the newly greened global capitalist system, on the other.
Citation Formats
G. DURMAZ, “EUROPEAN GREEN DEAL FROM A NEO-GRAMSCIAN PERSPECTIVE: A CASE OF GREEN TRASFORMISMO,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2024.