Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin European Labor, Capitalism Change Bonn One of the most significant developments in Western Europe since the war is the abatement of class and...
...they claim that the idea dates back to the wartime coalition government...
...This situation is completely reversed today...
...This troublesome issue has been shelved by a formula which could be variously interpreted to mean substantial further nationalization, or very little, or none at all...
...Here in Germany, classical land of socialist theory, one gets the same impression: Socialism and capitalism have both yielded a good deal of their former uncompromising positions...
...The Adenauer Government is certainly the regime preferred by Germany's "substantial citizens...
...Yet Germany is a highly developed welfare state...
...As both sides have given up their more extreme positions, a kind of compromise mixed economy, even if it doesn't satisfy the extreme theoreticians of either camp, satisfies most Europeans, perhaps most Americans also...
...A member of the Dutch Labor party (a right-winger, as he candidly described himself) who gave me an interesting interpretation of how both capitalism and socialism have changed during the last generation...
...What impressed me in Britain a few weeks ago was the cautious ambiguity of the Labor party spokesmen on the issue of further nationalization...
...Even those parties that stand strongly for private property accept the necessity of social security and the necessity for state intervention to prevent big depressions and mass unemployment...
...One finds the same trend in the Social Democratic party here...
...Between the two wars, there was high tension between the Austrian Social Democrats, the party of most of the industrial workers, and the Christian Social party, supported by the middle class and the peasants...
...Wilhelm Mellies, deputy chairman of the party, told me that nationalization has no place in the program on which the Social Democrats are waging their election campaign this year...
...In 1934, a conservative dictatorship was set up by Engelbert Dollfuss and carried on by his successor, Kurt Schuschnigg...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin European Labor, Capitalism Change Bonn One of the most significant developments in Western Europe since the war is the abatement of class and party antagonism...
...Old-fashioned socialism has also changed beyond recognition...
...The bitterness inspired by this civil strife helped Hitler take over in 1938...
...Almost one-third of the budget is assigned to "social expenditures...
...It was of President Eisenhower...
...This is partly because Germany, from the time of Bismarck, has been a pioneer in such legislation, partly because of the consequences of the war, with its widows, orphans, cripples and aged refugees, partly because of a trend of the times...
...I do think.'" he said, with disarming objectivity, "it may be said without exaggeration that the Labor party administration was not an unqualified success...
...There was sometimes street fighting on the barricades...
...Old - fashioned capitalism has changed in two important respects...
...others do not...
...Nor is there any proposal to undo the nationalization of the coal mines and the railways...
...He is a well-trained economist, with an excellent knowledge of industrial, economic and financial conditions in Europe...
...Some Laborites believe in pushing for more nationalization...
...even the battle of ballots has lost much significance...
...And the picture that hung on his wall was not of Karl Marx...
...They have been impressed by the continuing postwar prosperity in the United States and by the amazing recovery in West Germany, even if they may criticize some of the methods of Erhard's "economic miracle.' They see the advantages of consumer choice, of a free market, of individual incentive...
...The two principal parties have entered into what seems to be a permanent coalition...
...When I was in Great Britain three years ago, I was impressed by the mildness of the criticism which a leading Conservative party organizer (an ex-officer with an Eton-Oxford accent) directed against the Labor party...
...The Minister of Economics, Ludwig Er-hard, a jolly rolypoly man with a fondness for fragrant Havana cigars and an inexhaustible fund of energy and bouyant optimism, scrapped every Allied occupation economic control as fast as he could...
...And the Conservatives have made no attempt to repeal the large instalments of welfare-state social legislation which Labor enacted after 1945...
...Socialists have learned from the Soviet Union and from Hitler that total planning, total state control of the economy, can bring total tyranny...
...One left Britain with the feeling that the margin of difference between Labor and Conservatives today is little wider than that between Liberals and Conservatives in the 19th century...
...I drew a mental contrast with the sulphurous language of a hot Republican-Democratic campaign in the United States...
...Austria furnishes perhaps the most striking illustration...
...Not only are the Austrian Socialists and the members of the Volkspartei (successor to the Christian Social party) not shooting at each other with bullets...
Vol. 40 • August 1957 • No. 31
