Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Global cities
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter
  • Membership

Social Europe Needs A Positive Vision

Robin Wilson 5th December 2014

Robin Wilson

Robin Wilson

In his magisterial One Hundred Years of Socialism, Donald Sassoon described how, under the influence of the 19th century German leader Karl Kautsky, the European social democrat movement embraced a mechanistic scheme by which the immanent crisis of capitalism would somehow issue in a transition to socialism. This conveniently offered a reassuring fatalism about the future and a legitimation of cautious reformism in the meantime.

The crucible of war, factory occupations and the rise of fascism led the imprisoned Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci to the sober conclusion, however, that following such a crisis ‘morbid symptoms’ would appear. Radical change in Europe – ‘The People’s Home!’, ‘a National Health Service’ – stems from popular hope, not fear. If only more on the contemporary European left had understood its 20th century history they would not have been so shaken when the biggest crisis of capitalism for three quarters of a century did not automatically lead to a left-wing revival.

Indeed, quite the contrary, with the same deflationary austerity whose imposition in pre-war Germany fuelled the rise of Nazism being dogmatically re-presented, in the manner of medieval medical leeches, as the only remedy for the crisis and with the main challenge to that discourse – outside of Spain and, partly, Greece – coming from the populist radical right. This new authoritarianism is not just manifested in anti-system leaders like Marine Le Pen of the Front National but in the nationalistic ‘illiberal democracy’ trumpeted by office-holders like Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and of course Vladimir Putin in Russia.

‘Social Europe’, in that context, has proved far from an enduring acquis and in hindsight more a brief, western-European historical interlude in which the moderate Christian-socialist Jacques Delors sought, as European Commission President, to balance the drive towards the ‘single market’, in which national democratic regulation was cast as illegitimate ‘state aid’ – without, crucially, reregulation at the European scale of the transnational genie now out of the bottle.

Indeed, so far has the discourse been transformed by the loss of regulatory instruments that the left is now fighting a rearguard action against the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), hoping to remove the investor-state dispute settlement clause. This would give transnationals the power to sue mere democratically elected governments for having the temerity to believe those national levers of regulation remained in their hands.

The commemorations this year of the onset of the first world war remind us of how just debilitating was the split in the European left as ‘national’ socialist parties followed ‘their’ competing imperialist powers. The demise of internationalism as a founding left-wing value, while apparently unproblematic in the trentes glorieuses of Keynesian demand management and expanding welfare states, is now, a century on, really coming home to roost.

True, the European Parliament elections last year for the first time saw a genuine transnational personalisation of the contest, in the shape of Martin Schulz as social democratic candidate for the Commission presidency, but the Party of European Socialists remains a thin carapace over the national parties, some of whom – again particularly in Spain and Greece – have been hopelessly tarnished by their association with austerity in office, while others – especially in south-eastern Europe – have been tainted by corruption.

The European left desperately needs a political project which can take the form of a portmanteau banner behind which all can rally and which can resonate in the European public sphere, yet can be subject to further national, regional and local specification. The ‘Good Society’ discussions, involving intellectuals and activists from across the continent and supported since the onset of the crisis by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, have provided a helpful umbrella for that project to emerge.

Reregulation at the European scale involves key measures to place a precarious labour market on a more secure foundation, notably a Europe-wide minimum wage, the extension of the already-agreed youth guarantee to adults and the outlawing (as in the Netherlands) of zero-hours contracts. Measures such as these can stem a race to the bottom – including the exploitation of immigration in the enlarged EU by cowboy capitalists and the political exploitation of that in turn by the populist xenophobes.

Reregulation also entails constraining overblown financial capital through the long-awaited financial transactions tax. And it requires an ecological modernisation of industrial capital, driven by replacing the ineffectual, market-based carbon-trading scheme by an effective EU-wide carbon tax.

The revenues arising can be the nucleus of the fiscal capacity essential to give Social Europe real meaning. The new Commission President, the centre-right’s Claude Juncker – tainted by his association in office with the beggar-thy-neighbour tax practices of his native Luxembourg – has advanced a £300 billion investment package but with utterly implausible assumptions as to the multiplier effects of a very modest public pump-prime.

Fiscal and monetary policy must be unleashed if Social Europe is to become more than rhetoric. The economically illiterate fiscal brakes on member states must be removed to allow borrowing for public investment and measured fiscal consolidation. And the mandate of the European Central Bank must be liberated from pursuit of the scourge of non-existent inflation to become a lender of last resort with a commitment to full employment across the eurozone.

Most enticing in this context is Giacomo Corneo’s idea, advanced at the latest Good Society discussion in Berlin, of rethinking a transition to socialism as the accumulation of public capital through sovereign wealth funds. As Henning Meyer has extended it, a European fund could be a powerful symbol of stability and force for recovery.

Pics
Robin Wilson

Robin Wilson is editor-in-chief of Social Europe, an adviser to the Council of Europe on intercultural integration and author of The Northern Ireland Experience of Conflict and Agreement: A Model for Export? (Manchester University Press) and Meeting the Challenge of Cultural Diversity in Europe: Moving Beyond the Crisis (Edward Elgar).

You are here: Home / Politics / Social Europe Needs A Positive Vision

Most Popular Posts

Russia,information war Russia is winning the information warAiste Merfeldaite
Nanterre,police Nanterre and the suburbs: the lid comes offJoseph Downing
Russia,nuclear Russia’s dangerous nuclear consensusAna Palacio
Belarus,Lithuania A tale of two countries: Belarus and LithuaniaThorvaldur Gylfason and Eduard Hochreiter
retirement,Finland,ageing,pension,reform Late retirement: possible for many, not for allKati Kuitto

Most Recent Posts

Russia,journalists,Ukraine,target Ukraine: journalists in Russia’s sightsKelly Bjorkland and Simon Smith
European Union,enlargement,Balkans EU enlargement—back to the futureEmilija Tudzarovska
European Health Data Space,EHDS,Big Tech Fostering public research or boosting Big Tech?Philip Freeman and Jan Willem Goudriaan
migrant workers,non-EU Non-EU migrant workers—the ties that bindLilana Keith
ECB,European Central Bank,deposit facility How the ECB’s ‘deposit facility’ subsidises banksDavid Hollanders

Other Social Europe Publications

strategic autonomy Strategic autonomy
Bildschirmfoto 2023 05 08 um 21.36.25 scaled 1 RE No. 13: Failed Market Approaches to Long-Term Care
front cover Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship

ETUI advertisement

The future of remote work

The 12 chapters collected in this volume provide a multidisciplinary perspective on the impact and the future trajectories of remote work, from the nexus between the location from where work is performed and how it is performed to how remote locations may affect the way work is managed and organised, as well as the applicability of existing legislation. Additional questions concern remote work’s environmental and social impact and the rapidly changing nature of the relationship between work and life.


AVAILABLE HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound Talks: housing

In this episode of the Eurofound Talks podcast, Mary McCaughey speaks with Eurofound’s senior research manager, Hans Dubois, about the issues that feed into housing insecurity in Europe and the actions that need to be taken to address them. Together, they analyse findings from Eurofound’s recent Unaffordable and inadequate housing in Europe report, which presents data from Eurofound’s Living, working and COVID-19 e-survey, European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and input from the Network of Eurofound Correspondents on various indicators of housing security and living conditions.


LISTEN HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

The summer issue of the Progressive Post magazine by FEPS is out!

The Special Coverage of this new edition is dedicated to the importance of biodiversity, not only as a good in itself but also for the very existence of humankind. We need a paradigm change in the mostly utilitarian relation humans have with nature.

In this issue, we also look at the hazards of unregulated artificial intelligence, explore the shortcomings of the EU's approach to migration and asylum management, and analyse the social downside of the EU's current ethnically-focused Roma policy.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

WSI European Collective Bargaining Report 2022 / 2023

With real wages falling by 4 per cent in 2022, workers in the European Union suffered an unprecedented loss in purchasing power. The reason for this was the rapid increase in consumer prices, behind which nominal wage growth fell significantly. Meanwhile, inflation is no longer driven by energy import prices, but by domestic factors. The increased profit margins of companies are a major reason for persistent inflation. In this difficult environment, trade unions are faced with the challenge of securing real wages—and companies have the responsibility of making their contribution to returning to the path of political stability by reducing excess profits.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube