Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

Willy Brandt, who was a leading figure in German social democracy
and President of the Socialist International, frequently defined social
democracy as the ‘party of freedom’. However, ‘freedom’ in this
context always denoted freedom of the many, not of a chosen few.
He always defined the concept of freedom in comprehensive terms.
Freedom, on this interpretation, includes winning the battle against
poverty, establishing social security, and opportunities to participate
in politics, education, culture and prosperity; meaning that
freedom must be associated with the concept of equality. For
Brandt, however, it meant above all the unconditional recognition of
human and civil rights and guarantees of power-sharing and pluralism.
Despite the ambitious political aims of social democracy,
which also extend to society in general, there are certain limits to
political action from a social democratic point of view: human beings
must never serve as means to political and ideological ends.
On these grounds, social democrats are against racism, anti-
Semitism, nationalism and imperialism. This means that they recognise
the right to national self-determination and that, despite their
internationalist leanings, they certainly do not reject patriotism as
illegitimate.
Principles such as those briefly outlined here form the basis of social
democratic policy today but they are also to be found throughout
the history of the 20 th century.
The totalitarian challenges of the interwar period
German social democracy was engaged in a battle on two fronts
in the period after the First World War. It was not the war loans
agreed by a majority of social democrats in the First World War
that led to the split with the communists – there were many reformists,
including Eduard Bernstein himself, in the Independent
Social Democratic Party of Germany, the USPD. On the contrary,
it was the issue of democracy and dictatorship that caused what
quickly proved to be an insuperable difference between the two
branches of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the M-SPD
and the U-SPD, and the newly founded communist Party of
Germany, the KPD, which was very much against convening the
National Assembly and even sought to prevent it by force in the
January 1919 uprising. The main difference between the SPD and
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