Introduction

One does not need to be a committed supporter of a Green party to recognize that Greens have become a more or less permanent feature on the European political scene and one that is growing in visibility. The highly publicized failure of the German Greens to retain their parliamentary representation at national level after the 1990 unification election, the similar loss of parliamentary status by the Swedish Greens in 1991 and the very public internal wranglings of British and French Greens should not be allowed to obscure the more or less steady progress the Greens have made in other countries and, fairly generally, at regional and local levels. Almost everywhere in western Europe, the Greens are more established political parties now than they were even five years ago. Clearly, the widespread dismissal of the Greens as a merely transient and irretrievably marginal phenomenon has been proved wrong.