Fwd: The slow death of Social Democracy? The “ideological ruins” of Europe in which the centre-left must now survive
TLS - July 11, 2007
Holiday reading for Gordon Brown Vernon Bogdanor
Sheri Berman THE PRIMACY OF POLITICS Social democracy and the making of Europe’s twentieth century 218pp. Cambridge University Press. £40; paperback £14.99 (US $65; paperback, $23.99). 978 0 521 81799 8
Gordon Brown has moved into Ten Downing Street after ten years of
Labour government, the longest and most successful period of social-
democratic rule in Britain’s history. Yet he finds himself heir, not
to a living and viable philosophy of government, but to a collection
of ideological ruins. His success will depend on whether he can
construct anything new out of these ruins, whether he can breathe new
life into the dry bones, whether he can discover a new philosophy of
government for the centre-left as fruitful as social democracy was in
the past.
In undertaking this enterprise, he will have much to learn from The
Primacy of Politics by Sheri Berman; he would find it a great
stimulus to thought, and even, on occasion to disagreement. It would,
however, be difficult for him to disagree with the view that The
Primacy of Politics is one of the most thought-provoking books on
twentieth-century ideologies to appear for many years.
Sheri Berman begins by asking why it is that the history of Europe
since 1914 falls so neatly into two contrasting periods. Between the
wars, the continent was marked by turbulence and crisis, but, for
nearly sixty years, its western half has known political stability
and high rates of economic growth. What caused this transformation?
To this question, two answers have been given. The first suggests
that it was a result of the triumph of democracy over its enemies,
Stalinism, Fascism and National Socialism; the second claims that it
was the philosophy of the market which had triumphed over socialism
and communism. Historically, however, democracy and the market have
been regarded as in conflict with each other. Liberals from
Tocqueville to Hayek feared that the market could not survive the
coming of democracy, for universal suffrage would give power to the
unpropertied and ill-educated; Marxists in a sense confirmed their
fears by predicting that the majority in a bourgeois democracy, the
working class, would not tolerate capitalism but would overthrow it,
by peaceful means if possible, by violent means if not. Yet, both
liberals and Marxists came to be confounded when, in the post-war
era, capitalism and the market came to be reconciled. How did this
come about? That is what Sheri Berman seeks to explain in The Primacy
of Politics.
Her answer is that it was an undervalued ideology, social democracy,
which formed the ideological basis of the post-war settlement and
resolved “the central challenge of modern politics: reconciling the
competing needs of capitalism and democracy”. Social democracy,
Berman argues, offers, a genuine “third way” that preserves both.
Historians, she believes, have not noticed this because they have
overemphasized “the role of the middle classes and liberal parties”
in achieving this synthesis; yet the key role was played, not by
liberals, but by parties of the moderate “revisionist” Left and by
the institutions of the Labour movement.
Social democrat was originally a term applied to anyone from the Left
who rejected the nineteeth-century liberal economy; it was applied to
Karl Kautsky and H. M. Hyndman as well as to Eduard Bernstein and
Anthony Crosland. Today, however, it forms but one element in the
socialist spectrum, the revisionist element which began with the
German social democrat, Eduard Bernstein, the hero of Berman’s story.
Revisionist social democracy was not, she believes, a mere “half-way
house between Marxism and liberalism, cobbled together from elements
of incompatible traditions”; nor were social democrats merely
“socialists without the courage of their convictions”; nor should
they be defined, as they were by Crosland, in terms of particular
values such as equality. The essence of social democracy lies rather
in “a distinctive belief in the primacy of politics”, and an appeal
to social and communal solidarity through mass political
organizations – people’s parties.
These, however, are features that social democracy shares with its
ideological enemies, Fascism and National Socialism. Social democracy
and Fascism, so Berman believes, share a common genealogy, although,
of course, social democracy is distinctive in being the only
democratic movement of the three. The cover of The Primacy of
Politics provocatively juxtaposes posters from the Swedish social
democrats between the wars and the Nazis. Both promised work for all.
For social democracy, like Fascism and National Socialism, arose out
of the crisis of liberalism and Kautskyite Marxism at the end of the
nineteenth century, philosophies which denied the primacy of politics
and therefore seemed to countenance quietism, an approach which
proved disastrous during the Depression. Thus, although, in both
Germany and Italy, the socialists were the strongest political party
after the First World War, they proved unable to defend democratic
institutions.
Moreover, social democracy found itself in retreat in the inter-war
years everywhere in Europe except for Scandinavia, because it failed
to appreciate the force of patriotism. The doctrine that the worker
had no fatherland might, Bernstein conceded, have been true for the
German worker of the 1840s “deprived of rights and excluded from
public life”, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, by which
time he had voting rights and rights to social security, it had lost
much of its truth; and it was given the coup de grâce in 1914 when
the German SPD voted for war credits and the Second International
disintegrated. “On August 2, 1914″, declared Adrien Marquet, the
French “neosocialist” who later identified himself with Fascism, “the
notion of class collapsed before the concept of the Nation”.
Between the wars, too few European socialists appreciated the lesson
which the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès had sought to
inculcate, that their duty was not “to destroy patriotism but to
enlarge it”. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell memorably
broadened the accusation. “With their eyes glued to economic facts,
they [socialists] have proceeded on the assumption that man has no
soul, and explicitly or implicitly they have set up the goal of a
materialistic Utopia. As a result Fascism has been able to play upon
every instinct that revolts against hedonism and a cheap conception
of ‘progress’.” It took the triumph of Fascism and a Second World War
to persuade social democrats to break the near-monopoly which their
ideological opponents held on patriotism, and to make a new beginning.
Yet, although the new settlement owed so much to social democracy,
social democrats failed to reap much electoral benefit from it, since
many on the Left, especially in Britain, Belgium and France, still
clung to an older, more ideological approach to socialism; while,
shrewd leaders of the Right in western Europe – Adenauer, Macmillan,
de Gaulle – appropriated many social-democrat ideas for themselves,
appreciating that the era of uncontrolled capitalism was over.
Berman does not, however, seek merely to reorder our understanding of
twentieth-century ideologies, suggesting that in place of the Left/
Right dichotomy we might seek to contrast ideologies which assert the
primacy of politics and those which deny it. For she believes that
not only has social democracy been “the most successful ideology of
the twentieth century”, but that it also offers “an impressive twenty-
first century road map for politicians in advanced industrial
societies and the developing world alike”. That, perhaps, is less
plausible. For social democracy seems a doctrine appropriate
primarily to an era of national capitalisms (the years between 1918
and the 1980s), rather than to the globalized world in which we now
live.
There lies, as Berman well understands, a paradox at the heart of
social democracy. For it is in essence an internationalist doctrine.
Yet it thrives best in unified and cohesive national states such as
Sweden and Norway. William Beveridge, though far from being a social
democrat, understood this when, in his 1942 report, he appealed to
national sentiments, declaring that the welfare state would give
“concrete expression – to the unity and solidarity of the nation
which in war have been its bulwark against aggression and in peace
will be its guarantees of success in the fight against individual
want and mischance”.
In his classic text The Future of Socialism (1956), Anthony Crosland
had deliberately confined himself to social democracy in a single
state. In the Britain of the 1950s, protected by tariffs and exchange
controls, that may have been a reasonable assumption; it had become
totally implausible by the 1980s, when François Mitterrand found that
social democracy in one country was no longer a possible option; more
recently, in Germany, Gerhard Schröder preferred to accept the
resignation of his neo-Keynesian Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine
than to pursue traditional social democrat policies. “An expansionary
fiscal or monetary policy”, declared Tony Blair in 1995, “that is at
odds with other economies in Europe will not be sustained for very
long. To that extent the room for manouevre of any government in
Britain is already heavily circumscribed.” The dilemma which
globalization caused for social democrats has been well summarized by
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a leading French socialist and former
minister in the Mitterrand and Jospin governments:
The success of post-war democracy rests on the equilibrium between
production and redistribution, regulated by the state. With
globalization, this equilibrium is broken. Capital has become mobile:
production has moved beyond national borders, and thus outside the
remit of state redistribution . . . . Growth would oppose
redistribution; the virtuous circle would become the vicious circle.
Some social democrats seek to resolve this dilemma by arguing, though
with a diminishing degree of confidence, that, even though social
democracy may not be attainable at national level, it can be achieved
at European level through the European Union; the policy instruments
which are no longer available to secure redistribution at national
level could be made available at European level. The implication is
perhaps that the European Union might become an embryonic European
government. That might have been plausible in the Europe of the Six,
between 1958 and 1973, a Europe whose governments were mostly Social
Democrat or Christian Democrat, with a shared belief in the virtues
of state regulation and social welfare. But it is utterly implausible
in a Europe of twenty-seven member states at very different levels of
economic development, and containing a wider diversity of ruling
parties. Social democracy at European level is likely to remain a
utopian pipe dream.
Social democracy, Tony Blair declared in his Fabian pamphlet, The
Third Way, published in 1998, had as its main aim the promotion of
“social justice with the state as its main agent”. It presupposed a
strong state and a centralized state. For only a strong centralized
state could evaluate the needs of different social groups and ensure
that redistribution was effective. It is, therefore, severely
threatened both by the transfer of power upwards to the European
Union, and downwards, through federalism, regionalism, or devolution
in many states ofWestern Europe.
It appears, then, that the social democratic era is over. It
corresponded, just as liberalism had done, to a particular phase of
European history. Like its mortal enemy, Fascism, it rested on the
primacy of the nation state. It finds it difficult to survive the
advent of globalization and the EU. That, perhaps, is why Norway has
not joined the EU, why Swedenremains a distinctly sceptical member,
and why Gordon Brown is sceptical about the euro. For social
democrats fear, and rightly fear, that the European Union deprives
member states of the policy instruments which they need to construct
a social-democratic society. From this point of view, The Primacy of
Politics celebrates not a living ideology but one which belongs to a
past that has irretrievably gone.
Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at Oxford University. His
book, Devolution in the United Kingdom, was published in 1999. He is
the editor of The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century, 2003.