The Socialist Dilemma In Europe

...317-318...

...The result of this succession of conservative triumphs has been a "one and a half" party system...

...This was particularly important in the matter of nationalization...

...in Britain alone there was no break in Conservative continuity...

...it made its catastrophic mistakes in good faith...

...In Italy alone—for special reasons of history and temperament—this second body of opinion within European Socialism holds a predominant position...

...Here lie the true grounds for that suspicion of a sell-out on the part of men like Gaitskell and Brandt that the Left has spotted so accurately but has seldom expressed with clarity...

...Nearly all discerning Socialists have recognized that the central practical problem for their parties is to break out of the confined circle of almost hereditary Socialist allegiance which on the Continent has restricted them to between 35 and 15 per cent of the vote...

...The opposition to conservative rule had to be Socialist if it was to exist at all...

...Most left Socialists are unwilling to discard the old battle cries of nationalization and class warfare...

...At the same time the better economic heads among them have absorbed enough of Keynes to have lost their faith in the panacea of nationalization, and any honest left Socialist must recognize that class lines are far less sharp in Europe today than they were a generation ago...

...In this respect, their parties are the oldest and most routine-minded in Europe...

...To the uncommitted, on the other hand, the program suggested moderation and class reconciliation...

...THE SOCIALIST LEFT, then, is trying both to restore an old tradition of ideological affirmation and to adjust its goals to contemporary conditions, when it argues that in place of or alongside the conventional cure-all of nationalization, something more imaginative is required than mere adjustment to welfare-state capitalism...

...In France the advent of De Gaulle brutally upset the whole complicated chequer-board of party relationships...

...The defining characteristic of the Gaitskell-Brandt policy is what in this country used to be called "me-tooism...

...Since then, with each succeeding Socialist party congress, the evidence has been mounting of a slow but irreversible separation of Italian Socialism from Communist entanglement...

...In the two countries the ideological change differed markedly in tone and content...

...course, they can always be outflanked by an ideologically more supple conservative party...

...The Italians for the most part restrict themselves to opposing the stationing of American nuclear weapons on their country's soil...

...Throughout Western Europe, the logic of the left Socialist position is either a neutrality sympathetic to America or a new type of Atlantic Pact pledged to defend Europe by conventional weapons alone...

...THE MOST ARRESTING distinction between the Socialist Left and the most powerful moderate current is on foreign and military policy...

...The following autumn, the British did the same thing...

...The evidence is overwhelming—at least in Britain—that a turn to the left would mean an almost automatic loss of Socialist votes.* But is the current winning of elections the whole, or even the central, question...

...In the autumn of 1959 the German Social Democrats, midway between elections, were recovering confidence after their defeat two years earlier, and they were trying to put themselves in a good position for the election of 1961...

...Nearly all of them recognize that contemporary capitalism has vastly reduced the harshness and egoism of its nineteenthcentury predecessor...

...In France and Italy the electoral evolution of the 1950s did not follow so neat a pattern...

...But it is also a smug and consumeroriented society, in which private affluence is cancelled out by public penury, and most of whose citizens lack a living faith in their own values...

...The alternative solution for resolving the Socialists' current difficulties is both less clear-cut and less influential than that proposed by Gaitskell, Brandt and Mollet...

...Hence a new type of appeal to reassure the peasantry and the small middle class was required...

...And in all fairness one must grant that it marks a simplification of the multiparty competition which vexed European democracy in the interwar period and was at least partially responsible for the turn to fascist solutions in the 1930s...

...In either case the evolution toward a one and a half party situation has begun...

...they had not passed through British Labor's experience of actually carrying out a collectivist policy in the half-decade immediately following the war...

...But they have difficulty explaining why they feel this way...

...On the domestic front, the lack of full-scale rethinking is at least as apparent...

...It is convinced that the policy of the Gaitskells and the Brandts is myopic and, in the end, self-defeating...

...here also government by Christian Democrats has proved unshakable...

...government by Socialists in Germany in 1918 and 1928, in Britain in 1924 and 1929, and, most crucially, in France with the Popular Front government of 1936, brought disillusion rather than a sense of accomplishment—a loss rather than a reinforcement of popular following...

...In the autumn of 1959 both of them at last made explicit the departure from the hallowed Socialist goals that had long underlain their day-to-day political activity...

...It has been envisioned as a moral change—a transformation in the quality of life from an absorption with private economic satisfactions to a concern for human personality and the well-being of the community as a whole...

...The official leadership of British and German Socialism is currently ready to settle for something way short of what European Socialists have always dreamed of...

...While the majority of left Socialists argue for retention of the Atlantic alliance in modified form, some of the French are frank neutralists...

...On the Continent the abrupt changes of regime during the past half century, more particularly the experience of fascism and the Second World War, broke up or demoralized the parties of the Right...

...And those parties and groups which have maintained through countless checks and errors their Utopian aspirations undimmed, will find themselves no longer marginal half parties in a sterile and electorally hopeless political debate, but leaders and mentors of a great ideological reawakening...

...Even if Labor were to gain a parliamentary majority in Britain, or the Social Democrats should come to power in Germany, would they truly have solved their problem...

...Obviously this is a question that it has not completely mastered...

...Above all, the conservatives have known how to identify themselves with the undeniable fact of economic prosperity...

...It pledged a "new political style of honesty, of objectivity, of cooperation, of synthesis...

...It has a quality of popular spontaneity that in other countries has quite disappeared from contemporary politics...

...This is the central point at issue between the dominant Right and the uneasy Left within the European Socialist parties...

...And yet to pile on a counter-paradox, the Socialists alone seem able to muster a significant opposition following...

...They have agreed on the factual analysis of their plight...

...And once again, as in the other major countries of Western Europe, the chief elements of this opposition have been Socialist— whether it be the cautious and qualified anti-Gaullist stand of Guy Mollet's official Socialism, or the far weaker but more militant "autonomous" Socialism of Andre Philip and Mendi s-France...

...Coming to power just as the great shift was beginning, they soon discovered how to exploit the new social trends...

...In Italy, human misery of the nineteenth-century type is still a sharp reality...

...in advanced industrial societies the percentage of factory hands would remain stable or actually fall—it was the white-collared and clerical, rather, whose numbers were rising...

...More recently the outlines of a constitutional opposition have begun to appear...

...For a half century the Italians have ranked as the farthest left of the major European Socialist parties...

...Two years later a similar tendency became evident in Britain...

...Mends' eventual decision—after the advent of De Gaulle—to unite his shrunken forces with those of the Autonomous Socialists, was an act of simple political realism...

...For one thing, the existence of strong Communist parties, which remained quarantined from participation in government while still commanding more than one-fifth the popular vote, kept a large segment of the electorate from effective political influence...

...All efforts to build progressive parties on a non-Socialist basis have failed, from Mendi s-France's attempt in the mid 1950s to modernize the French Radical party to the constantly disappointed predictions that British Liberalism is about to make an electoral comeback...

...Its faith in the future is of almost childlike intensity...

...The conservative parties have learned how to adjust to this change...

...Its chief proponents are the left wing of British Labor, the militantly oppositionist fraction of French Socialism that calls itself "autonomous" or "unified," and the majority organization of the Italian Socialist party...

...the corresponding cultural policy stresses adult participation and development at least as much as formal schooling...

...they did not need to grapple with the British problem of whether to renationalize those branches of the economy—notably steel and road transport—which the Tories had subsequently returned to private ownership...

...In France Guy Mollet is apparently trying to lead the larger wing of French Socialism along the same path on which Gaitskell and Brandt have been moving in Britain and in Germany...

...In France the trend to the right appeared to be temporarily checked by fifteen months of Socialist rule in 1956 and 1957...

...10-14, (November 21, 1960) pp...

...It was not until the apparently far more favorable circumstances of the second postwar era had once again ended in disappointment that European Socialism began the examination of conscience that had been on its agenda for more than half a century...

...It is characteristic of the "New Left," not only in Britain but on the Continent also, to criticize the present situation "in terms of moral and esthetic, rather than economic, criteria...

...More particularly, it has raised an agonizing dilemma for the chief forces of loyal, constitutional opposition —the Social Democratic and Labor parties...

...Yet for all this there is something amazingly innocent about Italian Socialism...

...15-20...

...As opposed to the short-term "realism" of Socialism's right wing, it proposes such long-range measures as nationwide economic planning, a coherent public investment policy, and a vastly expanded program for raising the cultural level of the whole population...

...They may be functioning as only half a party, but no other democratic opposition has been able to win more than an insignificant fraction of the electorate...

...This is true only in an instrumental sense...

...In this sense its manifestoes resemble such American works of social criticism as Paul Goodman's Growing Uri Absurd...

...Very briefly, what has been happening in Western Europe during the past few years has been a vast speed-up in a long-term shift toward a mobile, undifferentiated, and consumer-oriented society resembling that of the United States...

...Moreover, the Germans were troubled neither by a vociferous left wing nor by the memory of a period in power which had to be rationalized and defended...

...At the same time, they argue that the new capitalism of the twentieth century, along with an unanticipated levelling of classes, has brought with it equally unanticipated evils of its own...

...While they argue that their countries' present foreign policy is dangerous and mistaken, they have not yet found an unambiguous substitute for it...

...The turn toward conservatism came first in Italy...

...The near-disappearance of the Communists and the Refugees, the German Party and even the Free Democrats, as important electoral formations simply strengthened Adenauer's existing lead...

...AT FIRST GLANCE it would seem that the British or the German solution—the path of Gaitskell and of Brandt—has everything in its favor...

...Postwar conditions pushed Socialist parties into power prematurely and without the parliamentary majority that was essential if they were actually to put their program into effect...

...A thirst for Utopia will reawaken everywhere...

...In its recognition of the virtues of free enterprise, the new Social Democratic program voted at Bad Godesberg rose to almost lyric heights...

...From 1948 to 1956 Italy languished in a condition approaching one-party rule in which no effective opposition was possible...

...But it is far from clear about the substitute it would offer...

...The succeeding decades brought no clear solution for this difficulty...

...Socialism may be old and unexciting, but it offers the alternative that the politically disaffected naturally turn to when they want a change from conservative rule...

...they have systematically encouraged the corresponding turn from ideological and political involvement— the apathy, the "privatization" of life, the blurring of ideological distinctions, the mounting suspicion that political debate is not very important, and the tendency to keep the larger public issues from general discussion...

...In the autumn of 1960 they actually succeeded in winning a majority in the party congress—until their position was reversed by the votes of Labor members of Parliament who remained loyal to Gaitskell...

...The great paradox of Western European society and politics is that the parties which apparently resist change are doing well while the parties with a vested ideological interest in change are doing badly...

...They suspect that men like Gaitskell and Brandt are engaging in a "sell-out" of traditional Socialism...

...As opposed to the nearly unqualified support that the official leaders of British and German Socialism give to the foreign policy of Macmillan and Adenauer, the Socialist Left is worried and disaffected...

...The new-old freshness of the Italian party offers a puzzling and still unexploited asset in European Socialism's current struggle for self-definition...

...The first (and more widely accepted) of the currently proposed solutions has been that of British Labor and the German Social Democrats...

...In the British case the reversal proved decisive: the narrow Conservative majority of 1951 was steadily enlarged in succeeding elections...

...They have accepted the welfare state...

...Its "concern is above all with the impoverished quality of life ..., the lack of a common culture, the decline of community, the dehumanizing effects of the mass media...

...It was the only great party that in the first postwar era tried to straddle the issue of affiliation with the Third International— the only branch of European Socialism whose majority failed to see the necessity of making a clear choice for or against the Bolshevik road to the future...

...They will not be within striking distance of power until they have converted themselves into welfarestate parties only marginally different from their conservative opponents...

...In Italy this situation of "frozen" leftist votes was reinforced by the fellow-traveling attitude of the main body of the Socialists...

...It proposed to take advantage of Brandt's position as mayor of West Berlin in offering the public a Social Democratic image of patriotism and orthodoxy in the Cold War...

...16-19...

...Hence there was a bounce and aggressiveness about them which British Labor understandably lacked...

...They all but eliminated the idea of class struggle from their public pronouncements, and they aligned themselves unequivocally with the foreign policy of their national governments, pledging support for an alliance with the United States based on the protection of thermonuclear weapons...

...American society is democratic by almost any definition one might choose to propose— far more democratic than the societies of Britain and France and Germany and Italy have ever been...

...A year and a half later, the new state of Western Germany was launched under similar auspices...

...It was not until the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution shocked the Italian Socialists out of their alliance with Communism that Italian politics began to approach the "one and a half party" norm...

...The German rejection of nationalization, then, was less equivocal than the British...

...And the great weaknesses of "me-tooism" are its lack of political coherence and the fact that it is so easy a game for two to play...

...The secession of the Communists after 1917 meant an irreplaceable loss from an already inadequate following...

...In contrast, European Socialists have seemed disoriented and bewildered...

...These have traditionally been the largest, the most influential, and the most conservative of European Socialist parties...

...So long as European Socialists pursue this • See particularly the series of articles by Seymour Martin Lipset entitled "The British Voter," The New Leader, XLIII (November 7, 1960) pp...

...It is undeniable that the European Socialist parties will not begin to win elections until they have convinced the middle-class electorate that they offer no real threat to private property or the prosecution of the Cold War...

...By his crushing electoral victory over the Communist-Socialist bloc in April 1948, Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi inaugurated a period of Christian Democratic rule that has persisted ever since...

...The truly damning indictment that the Left hurls at the Right is its willingness to accept a society dedicated to private consumption, a politically and ideologically apathetic society in which public goals are almost forgotten in the scramble for individual satisfactions...

...The British—drawing on the popular enthusiasm mobilized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament—advocate Britain's unilateral renunciation of thermonuclear weapons and the closing down of American bases in Europe...

...Traditional alignments and cleavages seemed lost in a monotonous uniformity of Gaullist allegiance...

...IN TRYING TO TAKE ACCOUNT of this puzzling situation of semipermanent exclusion from power together with an unchallenged role as the constitutional opposition, the Socialist parties of Western Europe have proposed two widely contrasting solutions...

...The answer is that the Socialist Left is taking a long gamble on the future...

...How ARE WE TO EXPLAIN a state of affairs in which conservative parties and movements have not only held on to power but enhanced that power for a decade and more...

...This would not be so surprising if the social situation in the countries in question had been stable or only gradually altering...

...Indeed this goal has not really been economic at all...

...Hence the European Socialists of the Left are convinced that their own countries' transition to an American type of democracy is far from being a total blessing...

...Moreover, the party was not fully united behind its official leaders, and Gaitskell and his allies did not obtain a clear-cut victory...

...Yet for all its militancy, British Labor's left wing does not explicitly spurn the "defense umbrella" of nuclear retaliation launched from the United States...

...This we Americans know to be true of our own country...

...Very often the rhetoric of left Socialism boils down to little more than an appeal for a return to first principles and a restoration of political militancy...

...Indeed, they intensified the earlier problems...

...It is only half true to say, as I did earlier, that nationalization of the basic means of production has traditionally been the major tenet of European Socialism...

...This situation has created new and unanticipated problems in the functioning of democratic institutions...

...For a full decade now—for a span of years that is gradually coming into focus as a historical epoch in its own right—the major countries of Western Europe have been living under conservative rule...

...The German Social Democrats had never held national office since the Second World War...

...They virtually scrapped the standard central plank of all Socialist programs...

...He agrees with them that nationalization and class warfare should no longer be emphasized, and that the new respectability of European Socialism can be most profitably expressed through giving bi-partisan support to the Atlantic Pact...

...the storm was already brewing that in the following year seemed about to sweep Gaitskell himself from authority...

...Competition as much as possible—planning only as much as necessary" was a slogan calculated to dismay the party faithful...

...In the past two years, it has begun to function as a constitutional "half party" opposition to Christian Democracy's dominance of public life...

...And the following year, by its decision to pass over the older party leaders and to present the young and "dynamic" Willy Brandt as Social Democracy's candidate for the chancellorship, the party once again recognized the value of electoral sex appeal...

...The Italian Socialist party carries around with it an enormous burden of past errors...

...Their political footwork has been slower than that of the conservatives— indeed, it is frequently the Socialists themselves whose instinctive responses have appeared the more conservative of the two...

...On the surface it tends toward the twoparty norm which Anglo-Saxons have traditionally considered ideal...

...But where does this leave the middle class...

...This problem goes back as far as the 1890s, when a few far-seeing Socialists of strongly democratic loyalties like Eduard Bernstein realized that the Marxian prediction of the proletariat increasing to become the majority of mankind would never be realized...

...And the moral impetus behind them comes from a revulsion against the threat of thermonuclear destruction that is leading through a steady logical progression to neutralism or even the preaching of non-violence in the Gandhian tradition...

...XLIV (February 6, 1961) pp...

...The coming to power of De Gaulle in 1958 reaffirmed a drift toward conservative solutions that had already been apparent for seven years...

...Although at Blackpool Gaitskell staked his party leadership—and won—on his insistence that Labor repeal the clause in its party constitution pledging the eventual nationalization of all means of production, distribution, and exchange, he was subsequently obliged to accept a compromise formulation...

...And it is true that the Socialist parties in general have a longer and more continuous institutional history than the various conservative formations...

...This is the real charge against the Right—far more than its faltering on a merely technical question like nationalization...

...What do these noble aims have to do with the overriding practical question of breaking out of a half generation of conservative dominance and winning over a new segment of the electorate...

...nationalization has been the means, not the ultimate goal, of Socialist policy...

...In its insistence on class struggle—in its adherence to a "maximum" program—in its reluctance to make a clean break with Communism, the Italian party has reflected the peculiar social conditions of the slowest-to-develop and the least prosperous of the great nations of the West...

...But this government in fact existed on conservative sufferance, and on the crucial issues of colonial policy—Suez and Algeria—it followed a nationalist and imperial course...

...In the short run, this is certainly true...

...As machines, they are conservative by definition...

...And on foreign policy, the disaffection of the party's left wing counselled a similar caution...

...Then the old moral message of European Socialism will come to have a new relevance...

...It has rather been the creation of a two-party system with a crucial difference—a hybrid state of affairs in which one of the parties seems to stand almost no chance of electoral victory...

...By 1959, after three successive electoral defeats— and four elections in which the Labor party had lost seats—Hugh Gaitskell began to lament that something "almost unprecedented in British political history" seemed to be occurring...

...But the real point about the evolution of the 1950s and 1960s has not been its gradual elimination of minor parties as serious contenders...

...Quite understandably, its Socialists have reflected this condition by clinging to a nineteenth-century faith in proletarian solidarity and to a romantic vision of a new world of human brotherhood...

...they have fostered the tendencies toward conformity that a mobile society brings with it...

...The Italian Socialist party epitomizes the confusion...

...In June 1951, the French electorate for the first time since the war sent a conservative majority to the National Assembly...

...Ultimately, it believes, a mere consumers' paradise will prove disappointing...

...But a full-scale re-examination of Socialist assumptions was never undertaken...

...He seems to believe as Brandt and Gaitskell do that the way to adjust to the present European evolution toward an American-type society is to convert European Socialism into a catch-all welfare-state movement, with fluid ideological boundaries, rather like the Democratic party in the United States...

...This is what Aneurin Bevan, in one of his last major utterances as the eloquent spokesman of British Labor's left wing, meant when he declared that capitalism had not succeeded, that it had produced an ugly society in which values had "gone all wrong...

...The outlines of this paradoxical situation first appeared in Germany.* * Otto Kirchheimer, "Notes on the Political Scene in Western Germany," World Politics, VI (April 1954), pp...

...History is full of examples of parties that have reached authority and then have lost power very rapidly, because they have not known how to behave once they were there...

...The Socialists, however—even when they were operating underground or in exile— never completely lost the sense of a functioning political machine...

...After the Second World War, the Italian Socialists were equally blind to reality...

...In Britain the meeting at Blackpool was held in the shadow of the third of Labor's successive electoral defeats, and the mood was one of somber reflection on past errors...

...In fact, however, the past decade has seen very rapid economic and social changes...

...But most of the adherents of Socialism's left wing have not reached that far in their thinking...

...Their decade and more of fellow-traveling grievously eroded their moral capital, breeding a distrust among liberalminded Italians which it will take at least another decade to efface...

...As Chancellor Adenauer's Christian Democrats raised their electoral margin every four years—as the Social Democrats lost in 1949, 1953, and 1957 (and seemed destined to lose once again in 1961)—it began to appear that the steady squeezing out of lesser contenders was not having the expected effect of equalizing the two major parties...

...Finally this longing will reach the middle class itself...

...s Lewis Coser, "Socialism and Apathy," DIssENT, VIII (Winter 1961), p. 25...

...Or rather—since the familiar class lines will have broken down so profoundly—dissatisfaction with the consumer society will become diffused throughout the population...

...they demoted the collectivization of the basic means of production —the nationalization of industry—from its position at the pinnacle of Socialist goals to a merely auxiliary (and unessential) status among a number of possible devices for economic control...

...Such planning emphasizes "social priorities" for the entire community...