The Locarno Dissent conference
Walzer, Michael
There has been a certain rapprochement between the American and European lefts over the past several years—a rapprochement in weakness and uncertainty, perhaps, but one marked also by a...
...Thanks to the complete assumption of production costs by the Harburg Foundation, the celebration generated a significant sum of money for Dissent—as well as reminding our mostly sober editors and readers that wit, humor, and song are an important part of the culture of the left...
...These commitments and doctrines have not survived the collapse of the communist regimes in the East, and intellectual styles are different 548 • DISSENT today—chastened but also open, skeptical, searching...
...I want here to acknowledge the good work of Antonio Spadafora, director of the Library, and Maurizio Virolli, who coordinated the program...
...Social democracy is the only practical leftism that survives in European politics today, just as some kind of left liberalism is the only practical leftism in contemporary America...
...The desire to explore these and other, related issues led to a general agreement to meet again next year...
...Richard Rorty's paper on "movements and campaigns" will be published in the Winter issue...
...Our arguments once looked disembodied, merely speculative...
...All these pieces will also come out in Italian in Micromega...
...Discussions focused on nationalism, multiculturalism, and the welfare state, with a final session on the language and structure of left politics...
...Among the people in Locarno, the Europeans were more worried than the Americans about nationalism, ethnic difference, and immigration (which is not to say that anyone was unworried about Bosnia, say, or Armenia and Azerbaijan...
...These two indeed have much in common, and so it follows that the internal critique of their inadequacies should also be a shared enterprise...
...Over the Rainbow The first annual Dissent musical celebration, featuring the lyrics and poems of Yip Harburg, took place this past May at the Promenade Theater in New York before an almost full house and an enthusiastic audience...
...certainly they were unencumbered by strategic or tactical considerations or by established institutions and party bureaucrats...
...We are grateful to the performers and to all those whose hard work made the occasion a success—especially to Deena Rosenberg and Ernie Harburg...
...There has been a certain rapprochement between the American and European lefts over the past several years—a rapprochement in weakness and uncertainty, perhaps, but one marked also by a recognition of common interests and values, and common problems, too...
...The discussions were both intense and friendly, and they revealed what may turn out to be characteristic differences between European and American leftists (though the number of participants was too small to say this with any certainty...
...the lively debate on the future of the welfare state will appear in subsequent issues in the form of articles by Joanne Barkan and Claus Offe...
...The celebration was also a commemoration of Irving Howe, on the first anniversary of his death, and a chance to reaffirm our commitment to the politics he represented...
...One sign of this new sense of commonality is the enthusiasm with which European leftists, including left intellectuals who were once anti-American by reflex, greeted Bill Clinton's election...
...they preferred plans to separate work and income, and to guarantee only the latter...
...And the Europeans were more resigned than the Americans to the failure of policies aimed at full employment and economic growth—and less interested, therefore, in welfare reforms designed to get people back into the labor force...
...For this internal critique has been our enterprise for many years, and it has led us to fashion a debate about market socialism, welfare, nationalism and ethnicity, liberalism, and civil society at a time when many European leftists were still constrained in their discussion of such topics by longstanding political commitments and doctrinal orthodoxies...
...We look forward to an ongoing series of Locarno Conferences and to a continuing trans-Atlantic conversation on "the left project...
...The Italian Library will once again act as chief sponsor and organizer, bringing in representatives of different East European lefts and expanding slightly the number of participants from the West...
...Now they look useful—especially so as Europe confronts characteristically American problems, which have formed the necessary background of Dissent's debates: immigration and pluralism, most obviously, but also the consumer culture, the underclass, the decline of the unions, and so on...
...Over the past decade, many Dissent articles have been translated in European journals, and the magazine itself has a small but growing readership in Western Europe and even in the East...
...No doubt, this hope represents a considerable comedown from the transformative visions of the past...
...In May of this year, a small conference of European and American leftists was convened in Locarno, Switzerland, initiated by our Italian friends to mark the fortieth anniversary of Dissent, sponsored by the Italian Library (Biblioteca Cantonale) and the city of Locarno...
...THE EDITORS FALL • 1994 • 549...
...A lesser sign of rapprochement, then, is the new interest in Dissent on the left, so to speak, of the European left...
...His issues, they discovered, were also theirs, and they hoped to gain impetus from his success...
...The largest group of participants came from Italy (including the editors of two left magazines, Micromega and Reset), but there were also people from Sweden, France, Germany, and Britain, and four Dissent editors and writers...
...Two of the conference papers, Mitchell Cohen's "Rooted Cosmopolitanism" and my own "Multiculturalism and Individualism" have already appeared in Dissent...
Vol. 41 • September 1994 • No. 4
