‘We Social Democrats’, Ernst Wigfors, leader of the Swedish social democrats, proclaimed in 1930, ‘cannot accept a system where during all times, even the best, up to 10 per cent of the workers must be unemployed, and during worse times, even more. We refuse to admit that this is necessary and natural despite how much people come armed with theories stating that this must be so.’1 Today, a whole century’s social gains have certainly not been swept away. Eroded as they are, capacities for economic and social regulation of the crisis are a lot more significant than they were in the 1920s and 1930s, precisely because of the social model largely inspired by social-democratic savoir-faire. And in all probability, as Karl Ove Moene and Michael Wallerstein have written, ‘in spite of the recent retreat, the legacy of social democracy in terms of a relatively egalitarian income distribution may be long lasting, at least in comparison to other societies’.2 The same applies to the social state, ‘the most lasting heritage of the organised labour movements of which Europe was the original home’.3 The social state is ‘quite simply central’.4
Nevertheless, we can no longer interpret social democracy, following Douglas Hibbs, ‘as quite dramatic evidence of the politics of solidarity’.5 This is patently no longer true. What is true is that the majority of social democrats have accepted ‘a system where during all times, even the best, up to 10 per cent of the workers must be unemployed, and during worse times, even more’.
Social democracy was – and is – a great historical, political and social current. It is therefore hardy. In a little over one hundred years its cartography has been subject to numerous changes in its various aspects, while retaining part – a part that diminished at each step, but nevertheless remained substantial – of its ‘essence’. But like the identity of any social actor and any collectivity, partisan identities are not ‘essences’. Innumerable social identities once thought to be eternal have disappeared, are on the way to disappearing, or have been profoundly disrupted and altered.
Social democracy is in the process of metamorphosing. That is the argument of this book. This metamorphosis is not a mere disguise to win over the electorate. Social democracy is not some modern Zeus, king of the Greek gods, who disguised himself as a bull or a swan to seduce the object of his desire, while retaining his divine identity. The social-democratic metamorphosis is profound. And it is profound because it is not simply ideological/programmatic, but encompasses every dimension of the system of ‘social democracy’. Thus, concealed under the same nomenclature, and sometimes the same behaviour, are realities that are no longer the same. Most of the time, what is done today in the name of social democracy is not ‘social-democratic’, in either the classical or the habitual sense of the term. It is not altogether ‘non-social-democratic’, either.
The ‘name is our soul’, wrote Odisseas Elitis, a great poet of modern Greece. But our soul is never indivisible. Social democracy is a hybrid political entity. It has been since at least 1914, when Émile Vandervelde, one of the major figures in Belgian socialism and newly appointed minister of state, having voted war credits, went to the front to buck up the troops. He was welcomed by soldiers singing the Internationale!6 Social democracy is a hybrid political entity. As we know, the existence of the hybrid beings of mythology – those famous ‘half-men, half-beasts’ – contravenes the laws of nature; it is a virtual ontological and biological scandal. But the existence of hybrid political entities like social democracy contravenes no law, either natural or political. Today more than ever, the term ‘social democracy’ accommodates distinct realities, a unique mix of two currents that historically are enemies.
The ‘secret’ of this book entitled In the Name of Social Democracy is a ‘non-secret’: the destiny of social democracy pertains to a historical contest between two versions of modernism, liberalism and socialism, or – in more current terms – between the logic of the market and the logic of solidarity. The ‘unfinished’ character of this conflict – which is without a definitive solution and is at least a century-and-a-half old, but still contemporary – is perhaps its most important feature. The struggle continues; it is still present, and always lurking in the background are its innumerable historical possibilities. Today – as in the past, but much more so than in the past – this social and intellectual contest has been transferred into the very heart of the social-democratic ranks. Social democracy is a political force that is torn between two versions of modernity: at the same time it has chosen largely to renounce its own version in the name of its opponent’s.
So is contemporary social democracy the ‘moderate wing’ of liberalism, just as it was once accused of being the ‘moderate wing’ of fascism? Can we talk about ‘politics without a left’, as Perry Anderson has written?7 Faced with this type of question, which directly confronts the redoubtable – and mysterious – problem of the survival and disappearance of collective identities – in this case, an identity that is more than a century old – any academic work trembles. It would have been easy to say, like Plato in The Republic, that ‘these things … equivocate, and it is impossible to conceive firmly any one of them to be or not to be or both or neither’.8 However, the trend of the last twenty-five years does not leave much room for doubt. The ideological/programmatic, organizational, cultural, and sociological apparatuses of contemporary social democracy represent the transcendence in actuality of the legacy of a whole historical trajectory. The latest modernization is outside the social-democratic tradition, and breaks sharply with it. In fact, ‘the only Left that is left’9 is on the verge of a rupture in its identity. It is on the point of crossing the ‘critical threshold’. To believe the contrary is simply to perpetuate a misunderstanding that persists in defying the logic of nearly three half-centuries of political and social history.
To conclude, however, that social democracy is ‘dead’, which would seem to be consistent with the analysis above, would likewise be to defy the logic of almost three half-centuries of political and social history. The social question, Eustache Kouvélakis has written, is inscribed ‘in the longue durée of modernity’.10 This longue durée establishes boundaries that are difficult to cross – but not impassable – in the action of political actors, particularly those, like social democracy, which were born and matured with the social question, a question that is at once both ‘archaic’ and yet dangerously modern. Perhaps, then, from a macro-historical viewpoint it is still too soon to respond to the intractable and crucial question of identity. If the ubiquity of the social question, that ‘young-old’ problem lodged at the heart of a triumphant capitalism, proves that social democrats have not fulfilled their own ‘egalitarian’ ambitions, it nevertheless has this paradoxical virtue: it creates and re-creates an electoral and ideological space for the left, which the latter has an interest in filling sooner or later. This does not mean that it will do so. Like those soldiers at the front who were attracted by the Internationale, social democracy remains a force attracted by the popular classes, the state, and redistributive policies. But it is noticeably more attracted by the middle classes, the market, and the logic of capital.
Social democracy is ready to ‘exit’ from its own history. It is playing out the epilogue. But who is not afraid of the ‘end’, and who can predict and foresee it? Given the fascination exercised both by the prospect of the ‘exit’ and by the ‘pull of the past’, the road ahead promises to be difficult. All the more so since the ‘pull of the past’ is surprisingly modern, and cannot simply be written off – as is so often done, in desperately simplistic fashion – as ‘antiquated’. It is therefore better to be prudent. Only time will tell if social democracy, which has hitherto withstood the test of time (and not by chance), will continue to be inscribed ‘in the longue durée of modernity’. And on the side of which modernity.
In questions of politics (and social history), it is good to recall that ‘the worst is not always sure (to happen)’.11 The future often has amazing surprises in store: ‘The book of life is the supreme book.’12
Notes
1.Quoted in Sheri Berman, The Social Democratic Moment: Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London 1998, p. 150.
2.Karl Ove Moene and Michael Wallerstein, ‘Social Democratic Labor Market Institutions: A Retrospective Analysis’, in Herbert Kitschelt et al., eds, Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, p. 207.
3.Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Death of Neo-Liberalism’, Marxism Today, November/December 1998, p. 7.
4.Jean-Paul Fitoussi and Pierre Rosanvallon, Le nouvel âge des inégalités, Seuil, Paris 1996, p. 148.
5.Douglas Hibbs, Solidarity or Egoism?, Aarhus University Press, Aarhus (Denmark) 1993, p. 66.
6.The episode is related in Mateo Alaluf, ‘Le compromis et le renoncement: les impasses de la social-démocratie’, in Hugues de Le Paige and Pascal Delwit, eds, Les Socialistes et le pouvoir, Labor, Brussels 1998, p. 302.
7.Perry Anderson, ‘A Sense of the Left’, New Left Review, no. 231, 1998, p. 79.
8.Plato, The Republic, Books I-V, trans. Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1994, 479C.
9.Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism, I.B. Tauris, London 1996, p. 777.
10.Eustache Kouvélakis, Philosophie et révolution de Kant à Marx, doctoral thesis, University of Paris VIII, 1998, p. 1; Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 2001.
11.Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, The Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA and London 1991, p. 154.
12.Pascal Quignard, Petits Traités, I, Maeght, Paris 1990.