4 - Social democracy in a fragmented world

Summary

The Third Way wave left European social democracy woefully ill-prepared for the political, economic and social turbulence of the first decades of the twenty-first century. When the global financial crisis of 2007–8 hit Europe, social democrats, who had spent the previous decade praising the dynamism of free markets and accepting light-touch regulation of the financial industry, did not know how to respond to it. However, this crisis was just the firing shot for over a decade of multiple, different and disorientating crises. Following the global financial crisis, Europe was hit by the eurozone crisis of 2010, the refugee crisis of 2015, the rise of the populist and radical right, Brexit, democratic backsliding in eastern and central Europe, the climate emergency, a pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, an energy crisis and a new war on the European continent. The dizzying speed at which each crisis was followed by another confounded policy-makers.

For social democrats this sense of disorientation was compounded by the loss of an ideological compass in the 1990s which could have offered some guidance on how to respond to these multiple challenges. The uncritical embrace of global capitalism, and in particular of the light-touch approach to financial regulation, which paved way to the global financial crisis left social democratic parties without an economic policy of their own (Manwaring & Kennedy 2018: 180). For these reasons, the crises of the first decades of the twenty-first century posed an existential challenge to European social democracy.

This chapter charts the travails of European social democrats since the global financial crisis of 2007–8. When the crisis started, some believed that the big crisis of capitalism had created a “social democratic moment”, that is, it had created a window of opportunity to revive social democracy (Bayley et al. 2016: 2). But for a variety of reasons, the elusive social democratic moment metamorphosed into an age of austerity and highly polarized politics which crucially did not insulate Europe from other crises. The chapter explains how this period was marked by the eclipse of electoral social democracy, which partly resulted from new changes to the electoral coalition of social democratic parties. With rare exceptions, social democrats were out of office, and when they were in power, they were too weak and isolated to develop social democratic responses to the multiple challenges they faced (Ryner 2016).