Where Now for European Social Democracy? - Policy Network

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Permanent reformism:the social democratic challengeof the future?PATRICK DIAMONDIt is commonplace today to advocate a strategy of ‘permanentreformism’ 1 for the European Left. Social democrats should distinguishthe enduring goals of public policy from the contingent means throughwhich they are pursued. The revisionist tradition does not represent afixed body of ideas or programme, but rather a constant questioningof the means by which traditional social democratic aims can beachieved.Conservative parties, it is argued, stand for maintaining order – thestatus quo – while social democrats seek to advance human progress,and by embracing ‘permanent reformism’, envisage the creation of asociety more equal, more free, more inclusive, more communitarian,and less disfigured by human misery and suffering.Permanent reformism affords huge opportunities for the Left andcould be the foundation for its long-term recovery – returning indeedto the situation at the end of the 1990s when Left parties held officein 11 out of 15 European Union countries.But we must begin by debating the structural obstacles to reform,what Anthony Crosland termed “the psychological resistance torevisionism”, and its consequences for the electoral fortunes of socialdemocratic parties – for revitalising the Left in Europe intellectuallyand politically over the coming years 2 .Throughout the 1990s many centre-left parties turned to reformistideas in the belief that they should not merely accept the marketeconomy, but embrace the values of enterprise, personal responsibilityand hard work. No single European social democratic model emerged.Instead, three distinct and coherent modernising projects havedeveloped since the early 1990s: the modernising statism of France,31
32WHERE NOW FOR EUROPEAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY?the consensual corporatism of Germany, and the globalized socialdemocracy of Britain.These transitions are founded on a paradigm shift within Europeansocial democracy since the mid-1980s.• The Left should remain steadfast in its commitment to socialdemocratic values, but maximise innovation in the means ofdelivery.• Liberty and freedom are the means, as much as the ends, of socialdemocratic politics and Left parties should reclaim their roots insocial liberalism.• The production of wealth is as fundamental as its redistribution: acoherent strategy for increasing productive capacity and long-termsustainable economic growth is fundamental.• Parties of the Left must embrace new currents in civic societyand seek to draw strength from the forces of change – namelyfeminism, environmentalism, and internationalism.The history of socialism revisionismA revisionist approach is, of course, nothing new on the Left – and weshould guard against scorched earth thinking. The current revision ofsocialist doctrine is in fact strikingly similar to the revisionism of thepast. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, socialists in Britain, France,Germany, Italy and elsewhere re-examined their doctrine andattempted to free themselves of ideological baggage they regarded ascounter-productive – with varying degrees of success. The German SPDwas the path-breaker at Bad Godesberg in 1959 presenting itself as agradualist social democratic party with the slogan: “planning wherenecessary, the market whenever possible”.As Thomas Meyer has argued, Bad Godesberg achieved a dramaticbreak with the past by ending the deeply ingrained dualism on theLeft between orthodoxy at the ideological level and half-heartedpragmatism in practice 3 . Gaitskell and Crosland pursued precisely thiscourse for the British Labour Party culminating in the failed revision of‘Clause IV’ in 1959.There are other striking similarities between the revisionism of the
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Page 8 and 9: Notes on the ContributorsTony Blair
Page 10: PrefaceTONY BLAIRI welcome this pub
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Where Now for European Social Democracy? - Policy Network

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