The return of war to Europe and plans to re-arm the continent have sparked fierce debate about what pacifism means – and nowhere more so than in the green movement. Three decades on from his passing, the life and work of Alexander Langer does not offer ready-made answers, but it does pose questions that are more relevant than ever: how can we get past empty sloganeering and actually build peace? And how can we make it desirable?
Thirty years ago we lost Alexander Langer, a leading light in the Italian and European green movements. A teacher, translator, journalist, politician, and non-violent environmental activist, Langer was a councillor in Italy’s South Tyrol province in the 1980s, before serving as a member of the European Parliament from 1989 to 1995.
Langer threw himself into his political roles, showing a knack for mediation, as well as great sensitivity and a relentless desire to build bridges with people from different cultures and backgrounds. His thinking and activism revealed a desire to understand both the present and its historical context by gathering information, staying informed, and grappling head-on with the realities he faced. This awareness of social and political dynamics allowed Langer to intuit – decades ahead of time – the great challenges of today, from the green transition to the return of ethnic conflict. Langer tried to find new tools and approaches for fostering peace and co-existence between peoples, supporting environmental and social justice, and bringing about the “ecological conversion” of consumer society.
Langer’s thoughts on ecological conversion remain some of his most significant and relevant contributions. These reflections were born of an eco-pacifist and pro-European activism that produced a wealth of noteworthy proposals and initiatives. Three decades on from his passing, what is Langer’s legacy? How can his thinking help us tackle the complex challenges we face today?
A laboratory for co-existence
Alexander Langer was born on 22 February 1946 in Sterzing-Vipiteno, South Tyrol, the predominantly German-speaking Italian province that borders Austria and today belongs to the Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol region. Growing up as a German native speaker but then becoming bilingual, Langer experienced what it means to belong to a linguistic community that is a majority locally, but a minority nationally. He understood that borderlands are culturally rich places, even though co-existence between the region’s three linguistic communities – Italian, German, and Ladin – has not always been easy.
A devout Catholic, from an early age Langer sought to achieve peaceful co-existence in a region riven by ethnic tensions. As soon as he turned 18, he joined a “mixed group”, which encouraged members of different linguistic communities to meet and get to know one another. These encounters served as a local testing ground for exploring the potential of a new model for interlinguistic co-existence in the province. With its unique historical, geographical and social characteristics, the South Tyrol became Langer’s laboratory for imagining the future of an increasingly multicultural Europe, and a blueprint for the peaceful resolution of ethnic conflicts.
After a period at university in Florence, Langer returned to the region of his birth, where he played a prominent role in the protest movement of 1968, before joining Lotta Continua, a far-left extra-parliamentary organisation. But it was in stints of study and political activism in West Germany that he first came into contact with early grassroots eco-pacifist groups that were springing up at the time.
At the end of the 1970s, Langer became actively involved in local politics and got himself elected to office on the New Left list that he founded. As a provincial councillor, he made a name for himself when he refused to take part in the province’s “ethnic census”, which he claimed entrenched divisions between linguistic groups.
In the 1980s, Langer continued to champion interethnic harmony in the South Tyrol: his political platform, increasingly green, advocated peace between people and nature, and a form of co-existence between linguistic communities that respected each of them without leading to political and social conflict. As a provincial councillor, he was able to engage with local organisations and to respond to demands from civil society in his institutional work.
In this period, Langer helped found a political ecology movement in Italy, drawing on his ties with the German Greens. He envisaged a platform that was not strictly party political and transcended the traditional left-right divide.
A Europe of peoples
Langer was elected as a member of the European Parliament in June 1989 with the Federation of Green Lists, and again in 1994 with the Federation of the Greens. The European Parliament gave Langer a front row seat at a key moment in Europe’s history, and he wasted no time in forging ties with the continent’s eco-pacifist movements. As co-president of the first Green group in the European Parliament (a role shared first with Portuguese MEP Maria Santos, then with German MEP Claudia Roth), he set out a pro-European vision within the fledgling political group, all while trying to balance its various internal factions. And despite the weaknesses within the 12-member European Economic Community structure, he never wavered in his support for a true pan-European political union.
During his terms, Langer focused on environmental protection, North-South international relations (arguing these should be fairer and more sustainable) and the defence of human and minority rights. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, he pushed for the rapid eastward expansion of the European Community to respond to demands for economic development and democracy coming from ex-communist countries. He also worked to resolve countless conflicts – from Cyprus to the First Gulf War to Israel-Palestine and the former Yugoslavia – calling on Europe to play the role of peacemaker and urging it to disarm and repurpose its arms industry. As an MEP, Langer frequently invoked the need for a common European foreign policy. Towards the end of his term, he turned more of his attention towards the Euro-Mediterranean region. He advocated for a further integration process that would focus more on responding to growing migration flows as well as protecting peace, human rights, and the environment, and promoting dialogue between religions and cultures.
Langer believed that the political unity of the European Community should come before economic and market unity, and the European Parliament should strengthen its powers to consolidate the democratic system. He saw the end of the Cold War as a crucial moment to restart the European integration process with a federalist and regionalist bent. In his vision, Europe was a shared home that should offer a compelling alternative to nationalism and to the drift towards exclusivism that was being fuelled by renewed ethnic unrest at the time. The transfer of powers from nation-states to local communities, regions, and supranational institutions like the EU was a cornerstone of this project.
Langer believed that the political unity of the European Community should come before economic and market unity, and the European Parliament should strengthen its powers to consolidate the democratic system.
From the European Parliament to Sarajevo
As his term drew to an end, Langer concentrated his efforts on finding a non-violent solution to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Frustrated by the inaction of European institutions and the failure of negotiations, he championed the Verona Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, a network that on several occasions managed to bring together different pacifist and democratic groups from the region who opposed the war. The idea was to give a voice to those shut out from official talks.
From the benches of the European Parliament, too, Langer tirelessly called for an end to the violence in the Balkans and for a peaceful, diplomatic solution that involved all parties. He encouraged the promotion of a free and less nationalistic press, support for forces of peace and democracy in the region, and the granting of asylum to deserters, draft evaders, and refugees.
Through the many official political missions and the so-called peace caravan, he visited the region on multiple occasions. There, he built relationships with those working for inter-ethnic harmony, like the mayor of Tuzla in Bosnia, Selim Bešlagić, a figurehead for such efforts. Langer urged the European Union to open its doors to the Yugoslav peoples and called for Bosnia-Herzegovina to join. On 26 June 1995, just days before the genocide in Srebrenica, he joined a delegation of MEPs and activists in Cannes, where the European Council was meeting, to launch a manifesto titled Europe is reborn or dies in Sarajevo. It denounced the policy of “neutrality” that robbed Europe “of any credibility with Bosnians and any respect from the aggressors”.
From early in the Balkans war, seeing the inertia of the European Union and the failure of negotiations, Langer called for the intervention of a UN-led peacekeeping force to stop the fighting and re-establish international law. In 1994, he proposed the creation of a European civilian peace corps to strengthen EU foreign policy. Made up of professionals and volunteers trained in mediation, this peace corps would be tasked with preventing violence, monitoring peace and facilitating non-violent dialogue and negotiation with local authorities in conflict zones. The project has often been revisited over the years by European institutions, but has yet to be implemented, despite the clear need.
Building peace
Langer considered himself a committed pacifist and peacemaker in large part due to his own lived experience of ethnic conflict in his native South Tyrol. But as a peace builder looking for concrete solutions, he rejected a generic pacifism that he saw as performative or dogmatic. Throughout his life, he worked with Italian peace groups like the Non-Violent Movement, the group Beati Costruttori di Pace (“Blessed are the Peacemakers”), and Associazione per la Pace (“Association for Peace), as well as global pacifist organisations such as Pax Christi and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. In the 1980s, in line with his pacifist anti-militarism, he also participated in campaigns for conscientious objection to military service and frequently joined marches for peace.
Langer’s work to end wars convinced him that institutions like the UN and international law needed to be reformed to be able to provide better tools for preventing conflicts. And he was not afraid to critique movements for peace and non-violence, either, as he tried to rethink actions and strategies for making them more effective. In this vein – and based on the model trialled in South Tyrol – he advocated creating inter-ethnic and inter-cultural groups, pacts and alliances for dialogue and communal action in conflict zones.
Moving beyond “performative” pacifism, Langer stressed, requires strengthening civil society action. Wars actually begin long before the first bullet is fired, which means that peace movements should aim to “expose and explain” the connection between our lifestyles and the financial interests that fuel wars. When politics fails, individuals can withdraw their support for an economic, political, social, and environmental order that generates a high level of conflict and violence. And to strip wars of their backing and justification, we need to strengthen rights to conscientious objection and broaden the cultural foundations that underpin peace and co-existence.
To Langer, it was clear that peace is inseparable from justice, from solidarity between peoples, and from the conservation of nature. But to prevent conflicts and make society sustainable, fear of a war or disaster is not enough: peace between human beings and with nature must be made desirable. More concretely, to gain support for them, we must show how the arguments for peace and for the environment are connected to people’s quality of life. We therefore need a new ethical impetus both to drive the ecological conversion of society and counter the arguments for war.
To prevent conflicts and make society sustainable, fear of a war or disaster is not enough: peace between human beings and harmony with nature must be made desirable.
Looking back to move forward
Writing in March 1990, Langer asked himself: “Would you actually live the way you say others should live?”1 Doubts about the consistency of his actions with his convictions nagged Langer throughout a life spent defending the marginalised and the oppressed.
His words seem as relevant as ever today because we see before our very eyes the consequences of what we have failed to “fix” and change. In his thinking, Langer brings together the complex challenges of the late 20th century: from the fight against climate change to the need for large-scale disarmament; from building peace and co-existence between peoples from the bottom up to promoting a vision for a political Europe that is fairer, more equitable and more sustainable.
But Langer’s proposals and initiatives were born of a historical context that was fundamentally different to the one we find ourselves in now. Rather than offering ready-made answers, his legacy encourages us to reflect critically on the present, on the way we act, and the need to devise innovative and informed responses to today’s challenges: the outbreak of conflicts old and new, the severe impacts of the climate crisis, and the urgent need to re-imagine political and social models in an era of profound global change.
- A. Langer, Il viaggiatore leggero. Scritti 1961-1995, edited by A. Sofri and E. Rabini. Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 2011. ↩︎