Sheri Berman
THE PRIMACY OF POLITICS
Social democracy and the making of Europe’s twentieth century
218pp. Cambridge University Press.
£40; paperback £14.99 (US $65; paperback, $23.99).
978 0 521 81799 8


Gordon Brown has moved into Ten Downing Street after ten years of Labour government, the longest and most successful period of social-democratic rule in Britain’s history. Yet he finds himself heir, not to a living and viable philosophy of government, but to a collection of ideological ruins. His success will depend on whether he can construct anything new out of these ruins, whether he can breathe new life into the dry bones, whether he can discover a new philosophy of government for the centre-left as fruitful as social democracy was in the past.

In undertaking this enterprise, he will have much to learn from The Primacy of Politics by Sheri Berman; he would find it a great stimulus to thought, and even, on occasion to disagreement. It would, however, be difficult for him to disagree with the view that 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 it is that 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. What caused this transformation? To this question, two answers have been given. The first suggests that it was a result of the triumph of democracy over its enemies, Stalinism, Fascism and National Socialism; the second claims that it was the philosophy of the market which had triumphed over socialism and communism. Historically, however, democracy and the market have been regarded as in conflict with each other. Liberals from Tocqueville to Hayek feared that the market could not survive the coming of democracy, for universal suffrage would give power to the unpropertied and ill-educated; Marxists in a sense confirmed their fears by predicting that the majority in a bourgeois democracy, the working class, would not tolerate capitalism but would overthrow it, by peaceful means if possible, by violent means if not. Yet, both liberals and Marxists came to be confounded when, in the post-war era, capitalism and the market came to be reconciled. How did this come about? That is what Sheri Berman seeks to explain in The Primacy of Politics.

Her answer is that it was an undervalued ideology, 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 democracy, Berman argues, offers, a genuine “third way” that preserves both. Historians, she believes, have not noticed this because they have overemphasized “the role of the middle classes and liberal parties” in achieving this synthesis; yet the key role was played, not by liberals, but by parties of the moderate “revisionist” Left and by the institutions of the Labour movement.

Social democrat was originally a term applied to anyone from the Left who rejected the nineteeth-century liberal economy; it was applied to Karl Kautsky and H. M. Hyndman as well as to Eduard Bernstein and Anthony Crosland. Today, however, it forms but one element in the socialist spectrum, the revisionist element which began with the German social democrat, Eduard Bernstein, the hero of Berman’s story. Revisionist social democracy was not, she believes, a mere “half-way house between Marxism and liberalism, cobbled together from elements of incompatible traditions”; nor were social democrats merely “socialists without the courage of their convictions”; nor should they be defined, as they were by Crosland, in terms of particular values such as equality. The essence of social democracy lies rather in “a distinctive belief in the primacy of politics”, and an appeal to social and communal solidarity through mass political organizations – people’s parties.

These, however, 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, of course, social democracy is distinctive in being the only democratic movement of the three. The cover of The Primacy of Politics provocatively juxtaposes posters from the Swedish social democrats between the wars and the Nazis. Both promised work for all. For social democracy, like Fascism and National Socialism, arose out of the crisis of liberalism and Kautskyite Marxism at the end of the nineteenth century, philosophies which denied the primacy of politics and therefore seemed to countenance quietism, an approach which proved disastrous during the Depression. Thus, although, in both Germany and Italy, the socialists were the strongest political party after the First World War, they proved unable to defend democratic institutions.

Moreover, 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. The doctrine that the worker had no fatherland might, Bernstein conceded, have been true for the German worker of the 1840s “deprived of rights and excluded from public life”, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, by which time he had voting rights and rights to social security, it had lost much of its truth; and it was given the coup de grâce in 1914 when the German SPD voted for war credits and the Second International disintegrated. “On August 2, 1914”, declared Adrien Marquet, the French “neosocialist” who later identified himself with Fascism, “the notion of class collapsed before the concept of the Nation”.

Between the wars, too few European socialists appreciated the lesson which the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès had sought to inculcate, that their duty was not “to destroy patriotism but to enlarge it”. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell memorably broadened the accusation. “With their eyes glued to economic facts, they [socialists] have proceeded on the assumption that man has no soul, and explicitly or implicitly they have set up the goal of a materialistic Utopia. As a result Fascism has been able to play upon every instinct that revolts against hedonism and a cheap conception of ‘progress’.” 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.
Yet, although the new settlement owed so much to social democracy, social democrats failed to reap much electoral benefit from it, since many on the Left, especially in Britain, Belgium and France, still clung to an older, more ideological approach to socialism; while, shrewd leaders of the Right in western Europe – Adenauer, Macmillan, de Gaulle – appropriated many social-democrat ideas for themselves, appreciating that the era of uncontrolled capitalism was over.

Berman does not, however, seek merely to reorder our understanding of twentieth-century ideologies, suggesting that in place of the Left/Right dichotomy we might seek to contrast ideologies which assert the primacy of politics and those which deny it. For she 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, perhaps, is less plausible. For social democracy seems a doctrine appropriate primarily to an era of national capitalisms (the years between 1918 and the 1980s), rather than to the globalized world in which we now live.

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. William Beveridge, though far from being a social democrat, understood this when, in his 1942 report, he appealed to national sentiments, declaring that the welfare state would give “concrete expression – to the unity and solidarity of the nation which in war have been its bulwark against aggression and in peace will be its guarantees of success in the fight against individual want and mischance”.

In his classic text The Future of Socialism (1956), Anthony Crosland had 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. “An expansionary fiscal or monetary policy”, declared Tony Blair in 1995, “that is at odds with other economies in Europe will not be sustained for very long. To that extent the room for manouevre of any government in Britain is already heavily circumscribed.” The dilemma which globalization caused for social democrats has been well summarized by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a leading French socialist and former minister in the Mitterrand and Jospin governments:

The success of post-war democracy rests on the equilibrium between production and redistribution, regulated by the state. With globalization, this equilibrium is broken. Capital has become mobile: production has moved beyond national borders, and thus outside the remit of state redistribution . . . . Growth would oppose redistribution; the virtuous circle would become the vicious circle.

Some social democrats seek to resolve this dilemma by arguing, though with a diminishing degree of confidence, that, even though social democracy may not be attainable at national level, it can be achieved at European level through the European Union; the policy instruments which are no longer available to secure redistribution at national level could be made available at European level. 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, a Europe whose governments were mostly Social Democrat or Christian Democrat, with a shared belief in the virtues of state regulation and social welfare. 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.

Social democracy, Tony Blair declared in his Fabian pamphlet, The Third Way, published in 1998, had as its main aim the promotion of “social justice with the state as its main agent”. It presupposed a strong state and a centralized state. For only a strong centralized state could evaluate the needs of different social groups and ensure that redistribution was effective. It is, therefore, severely threatened both by the transfer of power upwards to the European Union, and downwards, through federalism, regionalism, or devolution in many states of Western Europe.

It appears, then, that the social democratic era is over. It corresponded, just as liberalism had done, to a particular phase of European history. Like its mortal enemy, Fascism, it rested on the primacy of the nation state. It finds it difficult to survive the advent of globalization and the EU. That, perhaps, is why Norway has not joined the EU, why Sweden remains a distinctly sceptical member, and why Gordon Brown is sceptical about the euro. For social democrats fear, and rightly fear, that the European Union deprives member states of the policy instruments which they need to construct a social-democratic society. From this point of view, 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. His book, Devolution in the United Kingdom, was published in 1999. He is the editor of The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century, 2003.