On December 14, 2005, New York University conferred honorary
degrees on Gordon Brown and Alan Greenspan

Holiday reading for Gordon Brown

By Vernon Bogdanor
July 11, 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

The Primacy of Politics
Social democracy and the making of Europe’s twentieth century
by Sheri Berman
Cambridge University Press, 218 pages
 

The Primacy of Politics is one of the most thought-provoking books on twentieth-century ideologies to appear for many years.

Sheri Berman begins by asking why the history of Europe since 1914 falls so neatly into two contrasting periods. Between the wars, the continent was marked by turbulence and crisis, but, for nearly sixty years, its western half has known political stability and high rates of economic growth. Her answer is that it was social democracy which formed the ideological basis of the post-war settlement and resolved “the central challenge of modern politics: reconciling the competing needs of capitalism and democracy”.

Social democrat was originally a term applied to anyone from the Left who rejected the nineteeth-century liberal economy. Today it forms but one element in the socialist spectrum. The essence of social democracy lies in “a distinctive belief in the primacy of politics”, and an appeal to social and communal solidarity through mass political organizations. These are features that social democracy shares with its ideological enemies, Fascism and National Socialism. Social democracy and Fascism, so Berman believes, share a common genealogy, although social democracy is distinctive in being the only democratic movement of the three.

Social democracy found itself in retreat in the inter-war years everywhere in Europe except for Scandinavia, because it failed to appreciate the force of patriotism. It took the triumph of Fascism and a Second World War to persuade social democrats to break the near-monopoly which their ideological opponents held on patriotism, and to make a new beginning.

Berman believes that not only has social democracy been “the most successful ideology of the twentieth century”, but that it also offers “an impressive twenty-first century road map for politicians in advanced industrial societies and the developing world alike”. That is less plausible.

There lies, as Berman well understands, a paradox at the heart of social democracy. For it is in essence an internationalist doctrine. Yet it thrives best in unified and cohesive national states such as Sweden and Norway. In his classic text The Future of Socialism (1956), Anthony Crosland deliberately confined himself to social democracy in a single state. In the Britain of the 1950s, protected by tariffs and exchange controls, that may have been a reasonable assumption; it had become totally implausible by the 1980s, when François Mitterrand found that social democracy in one country was no longer a possible option; more recently, in Germany, Gerhard Schröder preferred to accept the resignation of his neo-Keynesian Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine than to pursue traditional social democrat policies.

Some social democrats seek to resolve this dilemma by arguing that social democracy can be achieved at European level through the European Union. The implication is perhaps that the European Union might become an embryonic European government. That might have been plausible in the Europe of the Six, between 1958 and 1973. But it is utterly implausible in a Europe of twenty-seven member states at very different levels of economic development, and containing a wider diversity of ruling parties. Social democracy at European level is likely to remain a utopian pipe dream.

It appears that the social democratic era is over. It corresponded to a particular phase of European history. It finds it difficult to survive the advent of globalization and the EU. The Primacy of Politics celebrates not a living ideology but one which belongs to a past that has irretrievably gone.


Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at Oxford University.