EUROPEAN PAPERS ON THE NEW WELFARE

1. Not what the Green Movement can do for elderly people, but what elderly people (green seniors) can do for the Green Movement, is the question.
2. Seniors are numerous (their number is growing), they have leisure, energy, creativity, experience, generosity, and they are above daily politics. They are not too old and too forgetful. When they tell clichés and commonplaces, they know it. Young people many times don’t.
3. The green social and ecological movement is not a transitory, not a passing one. If mankind wants to survive they will need an everlasting green movement.
4. The green movement is not a regional, not a national movement. It is an international and planetary one. Other political parties and movements (socialists, Christians, liberals, nationalists) can limit their action to a region or a nation, ecologists in the end cannot. International action is not a luxury for ecologists.
5. Green international and supranational action is necessary because multinational economic and financial structures exist and act successfully in this globalising world. These organisations and structures have no problems with languages, religions, mentalities, national identities and national feelings.
6. Natural, social and other disasters and calamities have international dimensions. The reaction of the world is often a sudden welling up of solidarity. What this globalising world needs are not only spontaneous international solidarity campaigns, but solidarity structures. Greens have to support Greenpeace, Amnesty International, UNO, European Union, Unicef, etc. and have to create new ones, the European Green Party, a International Network of Green Seniors.
7. In saving life on earth the competition is not one between the traditional political parties (the Greens included) but one between science, industry and technology on the one hand and the ecologists on the other. If science can not afford the solution there will be only the solution of the green movement: living in an other way, considering the wealth of families and nations in other terms (in terms of value in use and not (only) in terms of value in exchange) an other economy, etc.
8. The world, when science does not offer alternatives, will be forced to live in another way. This can lead to violent conflicts about water and other resources. The ecologists, who have been warning, will have to defend solidarity in international democracy and to avoid as much as possible wars and violence. That is the reason why we have to strengthen the green movement at international level.

Ludo Dierickx, The Green Movement, European Parliament (December 7, 2005).