Social Democracy in One Country?
Therborn, Göran
SOCTAL DEMOCRACY has always been a national project, usually with a veneer of internationalist rhetoric and transnational sympathy, but never drifting far from the "national interest." The year...
...In Scandinavia they have been impressively comprehensive and enduring...
...It is high across West Europe, regardless of the strength of trade union membership...
...Most European labor contracts are shaped by collective bargaining, even if only a minority of the workers are paid-up union members...
...As usual, the British Isles are out in the Atlantic Ocean, rather than part of Europe...
...National Institutions Matter Protection against the onslaught of inhuman powers was the immediate demand and first achievement of the labor movement...
...This institutional challenge by labor was variably successful and issued in different historical forms...
...In the early 1990s, if you had a disposable income less than 90 percent of your compatriots—if you were in what statisticians call the tenth percentile—you had 36 percent of the median income in the United States, but higher percentages of median income in Italy (42 percent), Finland (44 percent), and Belgium and Sweden (49 percent...
...Notice the huge difference between the world's two greatest exporters, the United States and Germany...
...In other words, the rights of labor have been institutionalized as collective social rights, in a sense similar to democratic citizenship rightswhich are valid even for people who are not members of political parties and don't vote in elections...
...cit., p. 666...
...But the rate of unemployment is not the end of the story...
...First-way social democracy still has room to maneuver in the world of globalization...
...Confronting it, critical minds should be on high alert—as with the opposite discourse of national "authenticity," often the drapery of traditional privilege and prejudice...
...This crisis in turn was caused by the bursting of a speculative bubble, generated by real estate prices in an inflationary economy and a lifting of capital controls...
...4. The Gini index runs between 0, total equality, and 1. The world's most unequal societies, such as Brazil and South Africa, have a value of about 0.6...
...ing that the state was responsible for maintaining an economy where all who wanted to work could do so...
...Nor is there any renewed European commitment to equality, a basic component of left and center-left politics...
...6. B. Gustafsson and M. Johansson, "In Search of Smoking Guns: What Makes Income Inequality Vary over Time in Different Countries...
...It refers to tendencies toward a worldwide reach and impact of social phenomena...
...more substantially in the adoption of employment targets at the Lisbon summit last March...
...The problem of first-way social democracy is not so much global constraint as internal social differentiation and ideological demoralization...
...To what extent are social democratic, one-country-at-a-time policies of making capitalism behave possible under the current constraints of the global economy...
...Protection against poverty may be taken as a criterion of a decent developed society...
...It includes satellite television as well as the intercontinental hybridization of popular music, the United Nations (UN) environmental and women's conferences as well as worldwide currency speculation, new waves of migration as well as movements of capital...
...Finland and Sweden are currently the two most advanced countries in Europe and perhaps, allowing for their size, in the world, in terms of the new electronic economy—Internet connections per capita and e-business...
...3 The risk of becoming, as well as of remaining poor, is higher in the Anglo-Saxon countries than in the continental European welfare states shaped by social democracy or Christian democracy...
...Social democratic reform has always focused on the domestic state, democratizing it, making it socially responsible, economically interventionist, and redistributive...
...The borderline between unjust inequalities and legitimate rewards or necessary incentives is fuzzy and contingent...
...For a brief overview such as this, the main international differences are captured by the proportion of employees covered by collective bargaining...
...We may gauge the room available for national social democratic policies by looking at three particularly relevant areas: social protection, redistribution, and institutional ordering...
...In the currently hegemonic culture, "protection" is not held in high esteem—in contrast to "competition," "risk-taking," and "entrepreneurship...
...Redistribution of the outcomes of property division and market power was the second demand and achievement...
...Anthony Giddens, who has become the spokesperson for Blairism/Clintonism with a human face, and its intellectual fig leaf, has argued that one of the characteristics of thirdway social democracy is "taking globalization seriously...
...The successes have been uneven, but undeniable...
...If they are clearheaded enough, they would also recognize the resilience and potential power of national reform...
...Currently, the European Union (EU) is mainly run by social democratic governments...
...Belgium 51.9 n.d...
...In the line-up of the Lisbon summit, British prime minister Tony Blair concocted a joint paper with the postcommunist prime minister of Italy, Massimo D'Alema, calling for more pressure on, and lower benefits for, the unemployed...
...The historical connection of world market openness and dependence, on the one hand, and generous welfare states, on the other, is still robust...
...The empirical answer to that question is no...
...15, 1999), p. 64...
...Had globalization finally caught up with the full employment commitment of first-way social democracy...
...Researchers have found what many people would suspect anyway: if the resources and horizons of parents are similar rather than significantly different, their children will have more equal opportunities: less inequality makes for greater mobility.' In other words, to oppose equality of conditions to equality of opportunity and portray the latter as less interventionist with regard to the logics of privilege and the market is a sign of not taking equal opportunity seriously...
...Redistribution and the Range of Inequality Equality has always been a key value of the left...
...Is there a price for egalitarianism...
...The Swedish average employment rate for 1990-1997 was higher than the U.S...
...DISSENT / Fall 2000...
...It is also striking that trade union membership and density increased significantly in the Scandinavian countries between 1975 and 1995, while staying the same in Belgium, and declining elsewhere...
...Full employment was once a major social democratic slogan and policy objective—meanDISSENT / Fall 2000 n 59 SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN ONE COUNTRY...
...P. Gottschalk and T. Smeeding, "Cross-National Comparisons of Earnings and Income Inequality," Journal of Economic Literature (vol...
...The link, however, is not causal...
...UK 32.9 25.6 Source: ILO, World Labour Report 1997-98 (Geneva: ILO, 1997), tables 1.2 and 3.2...
...The 1966-1994 time line of inequality of disposable income is slightly concave, with its lowest values in the early 1980s, but its main overall contour is one of persistent national differences...
...dollars, than being poor in Western Europe...
...Most striking is the variation of the coverage, and thereby the legitimacy of collective bargaining...
...I had better define "globalization" in a cool and analytical way, as something neither good nor bad in itself...
...Stockholm: Arbetlivsinstitutet, 2000), p.120...
...But reality is a bit more complex than ideology, and occasionally even the opposite of it...
...64, 1999), p. 591 7. Gottshalk and Smeeding, op...
...SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN ONE COUNTRY...
...Among rich countries, in this respect the United States is in a class of its own...
...Nowhere did social democrats cry for war, but everywhere the majority of them followed their national flags into one military alliance or the other or alternatively into a policy of neutrality in alliance with the right...
...Although orthodox neoliberals have refused to accept any employment goals, the growth of low-paid jobs in America has provided a model for many people in Europe, who argue that a major plank of employment policy should be screwing the unemployed...
...9 A more detailed and recent calculation of Swedish trade unionism shows a historical peak in 1993, but also a rate of unionization among private, white-collar employees of 71 percent in 1998...
...Job safety regulations...
...Netherlands 25.6 80.0 Norway 57.7 66.0 Portugal 25.6 n.d...
...Therefore, the OECD record of disposable post-tax and posttransfer income in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s is very uneven...
...A. Atkinson et al., Income Distribution in OECD Countries (Paris: OECD, 1995), p. 49...
...3. P. Gottschalk and T. Smeeding, "Cross-National Comparisons of Earnings and Income Inequality," Journal of Economic Literature vol XXXV (June 1997), p. 663...
...Swedish social democrats gave money to their Finnish comrades fighting communists in trade union elections, but on a more institutional, governmental level there was no help...
...Changing Educational Attainment in Thirteen Countries (Westview Press, 1993...
...British and American income inequality in the early 1990s was 60 percent to 65 percent excessive...
...Disposable income in France became more equal, while Italy's has fluctuated up and down, back up to its 1980 level Table 3 Tax Shares of GDP in 1997 Shares of personal income and total taxes in percent of GDP area income tax total taxes USA 11.0 28.3 Japan 5.9 28.6 EU 11.6 41.4 Scandinavia a 19.1 48.8 a Unweighted average of Denmark, Finland, mainland Norway except its North Sea oil and gas, and Sweden Source: OECD, Economic Survey of Norway (Paris: OECD, 2000), p. 96...
...Denmark 80.1 55.0 Finland 79.3 n.d...
...Among the unemployed in Nordic countries, only one in ten was poor in this sense...
...A. Atkinson, "The Distribution of Income in the UK and OECD Countries in the Twentieth Century," Oxford Review of Economic Policy (vol...
...Spain 18.6 82.0 Sweden 91.1 85.0 Switzerland 22.5 n.d...
...They do, because the institutional authority of labor makes a considerable difference in very concrete ways to the life chances of ordinary people...
...Each country was on its own...
...president Bill Clinton's insistence...
...First-way social democrats naturally tend to get irritated when Anglo-Saxon third wayers, who live in the most unequal of the rich countries, argue that more equality is impossible...
...An affirmative answer would be a rush to judgment...
...may change in the future, but we are not there yet, and, as we shall see below, national institutions and practices keep much of their variation...
...In spite of depression and mass unemployment, Finland maintained its low level of inequality in the 1990s...
...xxxv, June 1997), p. 661...
...Gustafsson and Johansson, op cit., p. 590...
...2. J. Vogel, Living Conditions and Inequality in the European Union (Luxembourg: Eurostat Working Papers, 1997), tables 5.4 and 8.8...
...64, 69-70...
...Germany remained stable in the 1980s, but moved toward somewhat greater inequality in the early 1990s...
...But social democracy has also raised the issue of institutional re-ordering more generally, focusing on democratic citizenship and labor rights...
...On the world scale, the main tendencies in the first half of the 1990s were the widening abyss between populous rural Asia and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) world, the growing urban-rural gap in the large countries of Asia (between urban China on the one hand and rural India, Bangladesh, and China on the other), and the internal polarization of postcommunist Europe...
...The latter is often discussed in terms of bargaining systems, formats of interest representation, processes of socio-economic policy making, and structures of "corporatism...
...France 9.1 90.0 Germany 28.9 90.0 Greece 24.1 90.0 Ireland 48.9 90.0 Italy 44.1 n.d...
...The boycott of Austria is constitutionally dubious, and the overcoming of anti-Muslim prejudice against Turkey requires accepting the cold war logic of the U.S...
...Within the bounds we are talking about here, no honest person could possibly argue for a price in terms of innovation...
...The calculations take the households of the unemployed into account...
...64, 1999), p 590...
...However multidimensional, the power of globalization is clearly asymmetrical, creating vastly more 6o n DISSENT / Fall 2000 resources and opportunities for capital than for people...
...Being poor in the United States means to be much poorer, in U.S...
...employee rights...
...To sweeten the pill they say that they are all in favor of equality of opportunity...
...But an enormous amount of research on social mobility and educational opportunity points conclusively to the massive reproduction of inter-generational class and ethnic privilege...
...The Swedish prime minister, who is—for better or worse—a quintessential first-way social democrat, expressed his shock at this foray into the terrain of neoliberalism...
...After World War II, Swedish social democrats tried to expand their own successful war neutrality into a Scandinavian defense union, but the leading Norwegian social democrats preferred the American army and the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) to a Scandinavian alliance...
...The governing social democracies of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s actually lagged behind the Scandinavian law commissions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which produced important proposals in commercial and family law...
...B. Gustafsson and M. Johansson, "In Search of Smoking Guns: What Makes Income Inequality Vary over Time in Different Countries...
...lective bargaining...
...Trade unionism and collective bargaining differ widely across developed nation-states...
...On the other hand, the shift from Christian democracy to social democracy is discernible in contemporary European politics: symbolically, in the boycott of Austria and the welcoming of Turkey (upon U.S...
...The proportion of Finns aged fifteen to sixty-four who were employed stayed above the EU average all through the 1990s...
...First of all, the most generous, the most protective welfare states in the world were constructed in small, open economies, heavily dependent on the world market for selling their products...
...Now, does this strengthened global power of capital make national social democratic policies unviable...
...DISSENT / Fall 2000 SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN ONE COUNTRY...
...Capacities for Protection All social contracts are about protection, against abuses of power above all...
...From the end of 1997 to the end of 1999, the Finnish rate of unemployment went down from 11.9 percent to 9.9 percent, and the Swedish from 8.9 percent to 6.6 percent...
...There are two key dimensions to these national institutions of labor market relations...
...Hur har den svenska modellen overlevt krisen...
...30 (Paris: OECD, 2000), p. 14...
...and market-independent social entitlements, such as unemployment compensation, sickness benefits, pensions, and access to health care, have been among the major mechanisms of social protection built up in the course of the twentieth century...
...Fine, equal opportunity is the patina of nineteenth-century liberalism...
...A. Kjellberg, 'Facklig organisering och arbetsmarknad: marginalisering av ungdomar och invandrae?', in S. Tegle ed...
...For the first time in postwar history, the four major countries of Western Europe have social democratic governments (Britain, France, Germany, and Italy), and social democrats are governing or co-governing in nine of the other eleven member states...
...9. B. Ebbinghaus and J. Visser, "When Institutions Matter . Union Growth and Decline in Western Europe, 1950-1995," European Sociological Review (vol 15, 1999), p. 147...
...So the labor market was allowed to crash in 1992-1993...
...Popular frustration with the government's indifference led to the victory of a bourgeois coalition in 1991, which also had priorities other than full employment...
...Correlation of export dependency and social protection (EU average not included): r = 0.26 Source: OECD, Historical Statistics 1960 - 1997 (Paris: OECD, 1999), tables 6.3 and 6.12...
...cit., pp...
...an advanced and broad technical education...
...Equality in Sweden declined in the 1990s but remained at the low end of the OECD range.' The tax structure of the developed world also remains highly differentiated...
...But let us formulate the issue in the first-way mode...
...by the end of this year...
...Protection and redistribution were embodied in social institutions and in enforceable rights and public agencies of monitoring and implementation...
...Globalism has often been a source of the diffusion of hegemonic ideas and models...
...since 1990...
...5. B. Milanovic, "True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First Calculation Based on Household Survey Alone," World Bank working paper, 1999...
...Although inequalities alone may be difficult to pin down, other than in abstract philosophical terms, we may use the common, pragmatic "best practice" criterion...
...new entrepreneurship, as in the Finnish company Nokia...
...GORAN THERBORN is a sociologist and co-director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala...
...With regard to gender there has been more success in recent times, for reasons still not quite understood...
...By the late 1990s, a third of the British and almost half of American disposable income inequality was excessive in this sense...
...So we will call unjust any country's inequalities that exceed those of the countries with the lowest rate of inequalities, given a similar level of development, under conditions of political democracy and individual self-realization...
...Today, given the range of human diversity (which the democratic left has always regarded as an indicator of the rich potential of human life), equality of resources and opportunities, in contrast to the more clear-cut equality of rights, is more a principle and a goal than a condition...
...2 Treating the unemployed decently doesn't mean keeping the total employment rate low or maintaining high unemployment...
...In the crises of the 1970s and early 1980s, an institutionalized commitment to full employment could protect the workforce from massive unemployment.' But the 1990s saw two spectacular failures in this respect, Finland and Sweden, with an average unemployment rate for 1990-1997 of 12.1 percent in the former and 7.1 percent in the latter...
...But the symbolic as well as the substantial politics are ambiguous...
...and public managers who were open early on to letting national champions compete...
...The former may be taken as an indicator of labor power, the latter as a sign of labor legitimacy, as this is recognized by courts, employers' organizations, and governments...
...Social democracy has not led to a more peaceful Europe, as shown by the enthusiastic British and German engagement in the Kosovo war and the British commitment to continue, with the United States, the (economic-cum-low-intensitymilitary) war against Iraq...
...Although often sniped at by old Stalinists and current third wayers, equality is 62 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 a core value of social democracy...
...American Sociological Review (vol...
...The problem is not global economic competition, but internal competition among social democrats over political power and interpretations of the world...
...When the storm clouds gathered, the social democratic gaze was elsewhere than on the labor market...
...The Challenge of Globalization Can this first-way social democratic project of national reform survive the onslaught of globalization...
...What happened to the unemployed...
...6 Redistribution in nation-states has changed recently, clearly moving downward in the SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN ONE COUNTRY...
...There is a not insignificant positive statistical correlation between the two...
...Taking Scandinavia around 1980 as a benchmark in the above sense, we can say, for example, that income inequality above a Gini index of 0.2 is excessive and unjust...
...SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN ONE COUNTRY...
...This is still the case today...
...SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN ONE COUNTRY...
...Blossfeld eds., Persistent Inequality...
...Has that made for a common social democratic Europe...
...The current question is, do these historically evolved institutions matter any more...
...It springs both from the left's social origins among the excluded, downtrodden, and non-privileged, and from a principled democratic conception of a community of free equals...
...What happened was that both countries ran into a deep financial crisis in the early 1990s, virtually bankrupting the whole banking system-which had to be bailed out by public money...
...In the mid-1990s, to be unemployed in Britain or Italy often meant to be poor: two of every five unemployed men and women had less than half the average disposable income in their country...
...One is obviously the rate of trade unionization (union density...
...If the prophets (and also the doomsayers) of globalization are to be believed, it is dead, dying, or in any case hopelessly backward...
...The labor movement and social democracy have been concerned mainly with abuses of capital's power and with human risks and adversities caused by the market...
...United States and the United Kingdom, but state capacity hasn't declined...
...The background is the old strength of telephony in Scandinavia, going back, with Ericsson, more than a century...
...In March 2000, Swedish unemployment was down to 5.5 percent, and is expected to fall to about 4 percent DISSENT /Fall 2000 n 61 Table 2 Relative Poverty 1991 - 1996 Percentage of the population with a disposable income less than half of the national median, taking household composition into account country poor throughout USA a 4.6 UK 6.1 Canada b 1.8 Sweden 1.1 Netherlands 0.8 Germany 1.8 poor at least once 26.0 38.4 28.1 11.9 12.1 19.9 a 1988-1993 b 1990-1995 Source: H. Oxley, et al., "Poverty Dynamics in Six Countries," OECD Economic Studies no...
...Atkinson 1999, op...
...government, that Serbs should be put down for trying to put down Albanians, whereas Turks putting down Kurds should be upheld for being anti-Russian and pro-Israeli...
...10 The Power of Social Democracy Most defenders of globalization have been forced to concede that nations and nationally rooted religious movements are resistant and vigorous...
...There are still very imporant national differences and space for national socio-economic policies...
...This does not mean, however, that inequality cannot be approached critically and concretely...
...5 However, among the OECD countries of Western Europe, North America, and Oceania there is no obvious common trend...
...Here the capacity for social protection is still vigorous...
...This Table 1 Export Dependency and Social Transfers 1990-1997 Exports of goods and services and public social transfer payments as percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) country exports social transfers USA 10.8 12.6 Japan 10.0 12.3 EU•15 28.1 19.1a Germany 24.6 17.6 France 23.4 22.8 Italy 23.5 19.0a UK 26.4 14.0b Canada 32.9 12.6 Australia 18.9 11.1a Austria 39.3 21.1a Belgium 66.8 23.5 Denmark 35.9 20.2c Finland 32.1 22a Greece 16.2 16.0c Ireland 68.2 14.2a Netherlands 53.1 25.5a Norway 39.5 16.1 Portugal 30.4 12.9c Spain 21.4 17.3a Sweden 34.9 22.8a Switzerland 36.1 16.1c a 1999-1996 b 1990-1994 c 1990-1995 The table contains all the old Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) members, save New Zealand, for which social transfer data are lacking...
...There is certainly no such project explicitly on the agenda...
...The other is the scope of colDISSENT / Fall 2000 n 63 Table 4 Trade Union Density and Coverage of Collective Bargaining in 1995 Percentage of wage and salary earners country union density bargaining coverage USA 14.2 11.2 Australia 35.2 65.0 Canada 37.4 37.0 Japan 24.0 25.0 Austria 41.2 n.d...
...Even under the constraints of the world market, specific national institutions are viable, including ones directly bearing upon the power of capital...
...The year 1914 provided the decisive test in this respect...
...In Finland, the financial crisis was aggravated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its economy, formerly a major Finnish export market...
...Swedish social democracy at the time was turning in what later became known as a third-way direction: concentrating on bringing inflation down, deregulation, and income tax cuts...
...1. Goran Therborn, Why Some Peoples Are More Unemployed Than Others (London: Verso, 1986...
...Rather, the point is that domestic constellations of power decide social developments, and that the world market is not in itself an important constraint...
...American Sociological Review (vol...
...4 The overall current trend of income distribution is toward more inequality, between countries as well as within them...
...However, no Scandinavian social democratic program was ever developed...
...The meaning of this, like everything attached to Messieurs Blair, Clinton, & Co., is a bit woolly...
...8. See further, Y. Shavit and H.P...
...rate, 74.0 percent to 72.9 percent...
...In other words, social democracy in one country has been possible, and single-country social democracy has been the only actually existing one...
...True, Scandinavia is a peripheral sub-Arctic region of its own, its labor movements historically linked, its social democratic parties maintaining close touch in office, with considerable inter-governmental contact and exchange of ideas...
Vol. 47 • September 2000 • No. 4
