On the New Europe

...No bloc of parties operates in an organized manner throughout Western Europe except for the socialist parties and their allies...

...There is a strategic shift as significant as the Keynesian reformist program adopted in 1959 at Bad Godesberg...

...Most observers believe that the German Social Democrats, with the Greens as a junior partner, are the likely next government of what is economically the most powerful country in Europe...

...For U.S...

...Austrianization" in what is known as the Rapacki Plan has a seductive allure...

...The new direction has been heavily influenced by three relatively new factors: the collapse of belief in the possibility of maintaining the post—World War Keynesian economic management that sought to provide full employment and an expanding welfare state...

...Their reemergence has helped to recreate a broad new left not restricted to electoral politics or economic demands...

...major openings toward reforms in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...

...But for a radical assault on the hours, days, and years of work to be anything but economic suicide the socialist parties and the trade union movement must make that push internationally, beginning in the unified European Common Market...

...The next planned expansion of the European Economic Community (EEC), will include the European Fair Trade Association (EFTA), with Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and Austria as members and with Finland and Yugoslavia as associates...

...A second, gender sensitive argument for a redistributive strategy is that an economy must have a social purpose, a moral justification...

...Pollution is a classic example of a problem that requires a transnational solution...

...There is also agreement on defending an advanced welfare state...

...But Western Europe must shake off the domination of the United States...

...Their steady revival, illustrated by recent electoral trends throughout Western Europe (with the exception of Great Britain) is paralleled by greater confidence in a Europe independent of the superpowers...

...and a joint concern with linking social justice and democracy...

...Also, the cold war exerted pressure for substantial concessions to the socialist and Catholic trade unions so that they could effectively replace these led by communists...

...The traditional parties of the right, which would normally have objected to progressive social legislation and the growing influence of the unions, had been discredited in good part through their collaboration with the Nazi occupation or their lack of enthusiasm for the resistance...

...Lions will not lie with lambs...

...The Germanies and European Autonomy Any prospect of détente in Europe reopens the question of the unification of the Germanies...

...and the growing impact of the Greens and other social movements...

...Swedish unions have not been an obstacle to the modernization of their economy...

...The welfare state remained immensely popular...

...There is a programmatic disorientation within most, if not all, of the democratic socialist and social democratic parties of the advanced industrial world...

...These conservative grassroots groups often reflect alienation from the impersonal, noncommunitarian social order that comes with modernity, along with an individualistic and competitive capitalism...

...Western Europe is crucial for the future of advanced welfare states and democratic socialist parties...

...It is this belief that is fundamental to socialism rather than state or social ownership of the means of production...

...it would spread the neutral zone eastward and westward, with Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland obvious candidates in one direction and Denmark, Norway, and the Benelux countries in the other...

...They have to undertake fundamental analyses of where society is going, probe the new class formations, and address the new forms of oppression in modern urban civilizations...

...The socialist parties of Western Europe are now recovering from the doldrums of the early eighties...

...The West European Community will be the arena where, more and more, these issues will be fought out...

...But "crises" change...

...They have always been there...

...The foundations of the West European welfare states were laid in the productive postwar years...

...The growing autonomy of Western Europe was accelerated by the military and economic recklessness of the Reagan administration...

...Human beings are not merely economic animals...

...Historically, the most fundamental claim of the left has been that it is possible for ordinary men and women to transform the societies in which they live and to do so democratically...

...For the labor and socialist movements to do more FALL • 1989 • 431 than merely survive, they have to begin doing again what they used to do...

...For that matter, the whole Atlanticist cold war consensus is going through a profound and possibly terminal crisis...

...The latter claim that basic change, as such, is dangerous, undesirable, or impossible...

...True, the labor-based parties have not yet caught up with the consequences of this plurality and the increased importance of the European Community...

...Some see this as the crisis of contemporary socialism, but it is probably more accurate to see it as the crisis of a socially liberal capitalism or, more accurately, a crisis of the neocorporatism that seemed to be the allbutinvincible wave of the future during the nineteen-sixties and seventies...

...Those were the years of Keynesian orthodoxy when it was generally believed that capitalist economic cycles were a thing of the past...

...This has created room for a wide consensus around an interventionist state with respect to the economy...

...This growing autonomy of Western Europe raises a number of possibilities: a neutral area separating Europe, from North to South, along the lines of the Olof Palme proposal for a nuclear-free zone, a unified neutral and demilitarized Germany much like contemporary Austria, a Finlandized Eastern Europe accompanying the complete withdrawal of all conventional and nuclear military forces from Europe by both superpowers...

...The economies were no longer perceived as zero-sum games, where the gain of one group could only be at the expense of another...

...Historic changes in world Catholicism also raise the possibility of alliances between democratic socialists and Catholicism in three major areas: a recognition that the North has a major responsibility to help the South...

...The ideal time for this to happen is during a period of major military cutbacks by the two superpowers in Europe...

...But a limited war in Europe with conventional, or conventional and "tactical" nuclear weapons, will not take place...

...They achieved gains that had to be defended by their beneficiaries, so that the clientele of the socialist and labor parties throughout Europe expanded enormously...

...Since most of them are officially neutral and not part of a military bloc, the entry of the EFTA group will increase the independence of the Common Market vis-a-vis NATO...

...Reconstruction and the take-off provided by the Marshall Plan provided unprecedented full employment with steady and high growth...

...It also proposes a broadened strategy of economic opening towards the "East" and a continued consolidation of the European community, which is to be pushed into major initiatives to deal with the growing North/South gap along the lines of the Brandt-Manley proposals...

...economy...

...Socialists have two powerful arguments for a radical assault on the organization of work in modern industrial society...

...But while it is programmatically a good thing for the left to develop a more pluralistic organizational and political structure, excessive fragmentation can make it difficult to move forward on more than individual issues of reform...

...Liberal and conservative parties are fragmented and nationally specific while the social Catholic parties are all but nonexistent in the North...

...New strategies toward work and increased sensitivity to the overwhelming problems of the environment require a new internationalism for the labor and socialist movement...

...A massively organized labor movement, as the Swedish experience shows, is automatically much less narrow and parochially trade unionist in its demands precisely because it uses the language of universal entitlement...

...The point has been well taken by the socialist parties in Greece and Spain that look to the community to provide minimal European standards of social policy...

...A radical cut in the working day, week, and life, could be financed by a redistributionist wealth tax, rather than increases in income tax, which generally hit the middle and lower income groups...

...Increased economic political integration of the European Community in 1992, combined with the penetration of national economies by the world market, make it necessary for the West European labor movements to shift their strategies in a less national and parochial direction...

...Summarized, the new thinking calls for an ecologically responsible, low energy, socially sensitive strategy for full employment and greater egalitarianism...

...This is why even the traditionally insular British Trades Union Congress is beginning to wake up to the socially progressive consequences of European unification...

...The routinization of socialism, the most universal and widespread secular faith of our century, also leaves an empty space...

...This must be achieved without giving up the labor movement's base in the classic industrial working class, the new working class produced by mass higher education, and the postindustrial and service sectors...

...military protection no longer to be perceived as necessary, Western Europeans must feel secure against military threat and political bullying from the Soviet Union...

...They have maintained full employment and an advanced welfare state in a period of world economic stagnation and in the teeth of hostility from the international banking system...

...Until the current détente, apocalyptic fears of nuclear holocaust fueled movements that provided a sense of commitment that many persons could not find in traditional organized religion or the mass parties of the left...

...What if the danger of military conflict in Europe is reduced to a vanishing point...

...These trends have been encouraged by the FALL • 1989 • 429 Soviet diplomatic offensive in projecting the image of a nation that genuinely needs massive cutbacks in military expenditures, and a prolonged détente, for its own economic reasons...

...It will almost surely spread within a unified Europe in which populations move around freely...

...In sum, the European economic unification in 1992 and the increasing independence of Europe from the Atlantic alliance will radically alter the politics of Europe...

...An integrated European Community provides a larger arena with which to carry on such a fight...

...Such a policy would also help the West European economies in much the way the Marshall Plan in the forties helped the U.S...

...That, and the increasing talk of a "social character" for Europe—defending trade-union rights, health, pension, education, and basic human rights— explains why conservatives like Thatcher speak as increasingly shrill "little Europeans" —minimalist when it comes to the social policy prerogatives of the Community...

...The elections in France, Sweden, and Belgium in 1988 went very well indeed for the socialists...

...In this moral critique of capitalism, socialists are joined by the Catholic church in most of its recent statements...

...What is needed is a "greening" of the classical socialist and labor movements without accepting some of the elitist attributes of the Greens...

...They are also a signal that modern impersonal capitalist, or perhaps just industrial societies have frayed the bonds of community beyond a point that many can tolerate...

...The feasibility of continuing post-World War II class compromises and welfare-state settlements, as well as the ability of Keynesian economics to manage advanced capitalist industrial societies, is very much in question today...

...Something of that past 430 • DISSENT can be recaptured through new majority alliances of the left...

...During the postwar decades, extensive welfare states became the norm throughout Western and Northern Europe...

...The labor-based socialist parties, as well as the Italian Communists now allied with them, are already the single largest organized political group within the European Parliament...

...The near demise of the cold war and the desperate needs of a debt-ridden Third World suggest Europe-wide reflationary strategies involving massive credits and aid to both Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the underdeveloped South...

...How can one imagine a NATO without West Germany, which provides half the army and the ground on which the conflict would be fought...

...This will strengthen the "natural" majority of the labor-based left parties within a unified Europe...

...in the late nineteen-eighties the socialists, with the Italian Communists, have achieved a plurality in the European Parliament...

...It has been pushed along by Gorbachev's diplomatic offensive...

...The Postwar Neocorporatist Compromise In contrast with Great Britain, the continental trade unions have had to deal with a less confrontational business community and a social Catholicism almost as ambivalent about an economically liberal capitalism as it is about socialism...

...The socialist movement, which is or should be much broader than the socialist electoral party, desperately needs those dimensions of fellowship, concern, and moral thrust that the religions at their best provide...

...a joint agreement on the right of workers to form their own unions...

...To mention only a few interesting side effects: it would deal a near fatal blow to both NATO and the Warsaw Pact...

...In matters of social policy it becomes increasingly less relevant to think in terms of single nation-states...

...it is, indeed, a recurrent phenomenon that permits some mild optimism about the present...

...To move further toward social transformation, the strategic core of the left needs to be massively organized and able to attract large-scale participation of the type we find in the "thick" social-democratic political cultures like those of Sweden, Norway, Austria, and around the Italian Communist party...

...The church no more pays obeisance to the "free market" than do the socialists...

...In turn, exciting possibilities for democratic change are opening in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...

...Increases in productivity make the present organization of work irrational and antisocial, since it forces millions onto the scrap heap of unemployment...

...Stable political parties of the left are needed to deal with the complexities of modern technology and to propose alternatives in terms of the common good rather than those proposed by single-issue activists or those who reject modernity as such...

...The old mainline socialist left—before the time of the pragmatism of a "responsible" electoral welfare state, the "reformism" of the social democrats, and the organizational fetishism of the Leninists—was a much richer, more culturally flexible movement...

...The proposal for a unified, demilitarized, and neutral Germany, like Today's Austria, has been offered again and again and is a nightmare for NATO's supporters, as it is for those who insist that the cold war must last forever...

...It is a version of the Palme proposal: a bloc of neutral states starting with Sweden in the North moving through the Germanies to Austria, then on to Yugoslavia...

...This is not the first time that socialism is in "crisis...

...It was broadly assumed that a new social compact between the major class contenders would be reached, based on creating huge "Fordist" markets throughout Western Europe, thus increasing the purchasing power of the working classes...

...This has given the labor movement a greater legitimacy and political leverage than exists in other advanced industrial countries and has produced neither high unemployment nor high inflation...

...There is need for a universalist vision of the common good and a moral drive if a socialist movement is to be reconstituted...

...Despite a decade of continual inner troubles, the social democratic parties achieved their widest electoral gains only to be turned back by the prolonged economic crisis that followed the oil shock of 1973...

...Even if it did, it is not at all clear that NATO would not win a smashing victory with the support of an East European population that certainly will not fight on behalf of systems it hates...

...It is hard to imagine a more powerful electoral platform for the Social Democrats than to call for a unified democratic Germany in a peaceful Europe...

...A crisis of confidence in a movement committed to a fundamental change is more serious than similar 428 • DISSENT crises among supporters of the existing order...

...The peace groups, feminism, and free or countercultural groups are old friends on the left...

...That space is sometimes occupied by the new social movements of both left and right...

...Often propelled by that same alienation toward an ugly racism and nationalism, these groups provide a warning to all those who get too enthusiastic about communities, affinity groups, and community control...

...Although the French experience suggests caution on the limits of what is possible with bureaucratic experiments in the economy, the experiences of Austria and Sweden show that single countries do have a range of options...

...Add to these a common hostility to the nuclear arms race and world dominated by superpowers and we may be witnessing a historic shift in political alliances...

...The German Social Democrats have been pushed steadily to the left by the hostility of Washington under both Reagan and Bush on one side and pressure from the Greens and new social movements on the other...

...In modern democracy, an attack on the welfare state is an attack on the legitimacy of the social order itself...

...Obsolescence of the Cold War Responding to its own economic and ideological crises, the Soviet leadership under Gorbachev is extraordinarily open at this time to political and economic reforms and proposals for radical cutbacks in military expenditures...

...Classical capitalism worked morally on the assumption that the massive pursuit of rationally selfish economic goals would produce a total social good that in turn would improve the lives of all...

...The first is that the huge increases in productivity in the countries of advanced capitalism have simply not been fairly distributed...

...Therefore socialists must insist that the social welfare state is a part of the democratic social contract, a civic right...

...Long-range credits on favorable terms to the Soviets can advance both this trend and the modernization of their society...

...Social Movements and the European Community The growth of populist nationalism in Europe is as important as the better publicized social movements of the left...

...The economy and society were seen as a growing pie, with plenty for all...

...The Swedish trade union policy of solidaristic bargaining, for example, does not favor the better-placed skilled workers at the expense of those in a weaker position...

...This is essential if they are to deal with multinationals, the mobility of labor, and the constant danger of capital flight, all of which threaten the existing welfare states and social programs...

...That is increasingly no more than a mockery in an economy where billions are made not by manufacturing or inventing new processes but by moving speculative paper and gambling on real estate...

...An Autonomous Europe The current debate inside the largest and most significant Social Democratic party, the German SPD, represents a promising new departure...

...This strengthens the Western advocates of disarmament as well as the tendency in Western Europe toward greater autonomy...