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The Americanization of the European Left*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Milton J. Esman
Milton J. Esman*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

In The Debate That Continues To Rage Over The Question Of American exceptionalism, two facts are historically well established that have distinguished the United States from European countries: the United States failed to develop and to institutionalize an electorally viable social democratic or labour party that represents the interests of its unionized working class and aspires to achieve a socialist society; and the United States has lagged behind its European counterparts in building the institutions of a comprehensive welfare state.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , July 2002 , pp. 359 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2002

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Sidney Tarrow, Theodore Lowi, Elizabeth Sanders, Peter Katzenstein, Davydd Greenwood, Jeremy Rabkin, Jerome Ziegler, Matthew Evangelista and Jonas Pontusson for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Scott Siegel provided valuable research assistance.

References

1 For an extended exploration of the intellectual history of the notion of American exceptionalism and its treatment by various scholars, see: Lipset, Seymour Martin, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, New York, W. W. Norton, 1996;Google Scholar Kammen, Michael, ‘The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration’, American Quarterly, 45:1 (03 1993), pp. 1–43;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Voss, Kim, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993;Google Scholar Marks, Gary, ‘American Exceptionalism in Comparative Prespective’, in Unions in Politics: Britain, Germany, and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989, ch. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foner, Eric, ‘Why is there no Socialism in the United States?’, History Workshop Journal, 17 (Spring 1984), pp. 74–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sombart, Werner, Why is there no Socialism in the United States’?, White Plains, NY, International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976 (first published in German, 1906)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lipset, S. M., American Exceptionalism, especially his ch. 3, ‘Socialism in Unions in the United States and Canada’, pp. 77–109;Google Scholar Lipset, Seymor Martin and Marks, Gary, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, New York, W. W. Norton, 2000;Google Scholar and the essays in Jean Heffer and Janine Rovet (eds), Why Is There No Socialism in the United States, Paris, Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1988, especially those by Eric Foner pp. 55–68, Victoria de Grazia, pp. 167–92, Alan Vaudagna pp. 237–52 and Alan Dawley pp. 311–15, which speculate on the absence of a significant socialist movement in American politics.

2 The notion of America as the most advanced industrial society, thus the pacesetter for other modernizing countries, and its implications for leftist politics has been explored by many authors from de Tocqueville to Marx. The history of this concept is reviewed by Seymour Martin Lipset, ‘The End of Political Exceptionalism’, Madrid, Institute Juan March de Estudios y Investigationes, Working Paper 1999/141, November 1999.

3 Among these factors were: the electoral system which determined whether governments are majoritarian, as in Britain, or coalitions, as in Germany; the percentage of the labour force enrolled in unions; and the internal structures of the parties and their leadership strategies. The literature contains a number of country-by-country summaries of the post-Second World War experiences of European social democratic parties, e.g. Merkel, Wolfgang, ‘After the Golden Age: Is Social Democracy Doomed to Decline?’, in Lemke, Christiane and Marks, Gary (eds), The Crisis of Socialism in Europe, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1992 Google Scholar; Kitschelt, Herbert, The Transformation of European Social Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Padgett, Stephen and Paterson, William E., A History of Social Democracy in Post-War Europe, London, Longmans, 1991;Google Scholar Gillespie, Richard and Paterson, William E. (eds), Special Issue of West European Politics on ‘Rethinking Social Democracy in Western Europe’ (01 1993);Google Scholar and S. M. Lipset, American Exceptionalism.

4 The ‘revisionists’ whose most influential thinker was the German, Eduard Bernstein, rejected the orthodox Marxian predictions about the increasing immiseration of the proletariat and the imminent collapse of capitalism due to its internal contradictions. They advocated instead a gradualist approach to socialism by extracting reforms through union and electoral pressures that would improve the working and living conditions of workers and their families.

5 The achievement of socialism by a worker-led party gaining power by electoral victory at the national parliamentary level has been the core strategy of European social democrats. Alternative strategies based on non-governmental communi-tarianism or associational activities have been present in the European left, including anarcho-syndicalism in Spain and Italy, Chartism and guild socialism in Britain, and cooperatives in Scandinavia. These have represented minority strains in the European left. They are reviewed by Geoff Eley, ‘Reviewing the Socialist Tradition’, in C. Lemke and G. Marks, The Crisis of Socialism in Europe, pp. 35–45. Communitarianism has recurred from time to time in the US, most recently in the New Left movement of the 1960s.

6 The success of the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution of 1917 precipitated a major split in the international socialist movement. Those who were prepared to accept the Leninist doctrine and discipline of democratic centralism, policy and tactical guidance by the new Soviet-controlled Third International, and the need for violent revolution led by a vanguard party followed by dictatorship of the proletariat, broke away and formed separate communist parties. They were present in all the European countries, but were particularly active in France, Italy, and before the Nazi era in Germany. Those which continued to adhere to democratic processes, for example the British Labour Party, the German, Austrian and Swedish Social Democrats, and the French SFIO (later the Socialist Party) composed what I refer to as the European democratic left.

7 Geoff Eley, ‘Reviewing the Socialist Tradition’, p. 55. For an analysis of the post-Second World War emergence of European ‘catch-all’ parties, see Kirchheimer, Otto, ‘The Transformation of the Western European Party Systems’ in Lapolombara, Joseph and Wiener, Myron (eds), Political Parties and Political Development, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1966.Google Scholar

8 The Swedish Social Democrats were the pioneers in the 1930s, innovating the mixed economy model of democratic capitalism. A landmark was the Bad Godesberg declaration of the influential German Social Democrats in 1959 which embraced the private enterprise social market economy humanized by a comprehensive welfare state and the mitbestimmung model of industrial relations.

9 At the rhetorical level, French socialists faithful to the dirigist strain in French political culture have been sceptical of the Third Way. In practice, however, their performance has differed little from that of their British and German counterparts.

10 The New Labour government in Britain that took office in 1997 did nothing to reduce the severe constraints on labour union activity that were imposed during the Thatcher era. In July 2000 Germany’s Social Democratic Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, succeeded in substantially reducing taxes on corporate income, capital gains and personal incomes. This was regarded by the conservative Economist (22 July 2000, pp. 47–8) as the signal triumph of his two-year tenure, a feat that even his conservative predecessors had been unable to accomplish during the previous sixteen years.

11 The experience of labour unions in the various European countries affected the attitudes of the leftist parties toward partnership. Unions in Germany, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands had long practised the politics of partnership with industry through their national corporatist institutions, while the mitbestimmung institutions in Germany encouraged cooperation at the factory level. Others, notably in Britain and France, maintained adversarial postures toward management. On these trends in European social democracy, see Miliband, David (ed.), Reinventing the Left, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994;Google Scholar Gamble, Andrew and Wright, Tony (eds), The New Social Democracy, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers (The Political Quarterly in Association with the Fabian Society), 1994;Google Scholar Sassoon, Donald (ed.), Looking Left: European Socialism After the Cold War, London, I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1997;Google Scholar Scharpf, Fritz W., Crisis and Choice in European Social Democracy, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1991 (published in German 1987);Google Scholar and Derber, Charles, What’s Left: Radical Politics in the Post-Communist Era, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.Google Scholar

12 For a classic statement of the European left’s post-cold war orientation, see the manifesto, The Third Way - Die Neue Mitte issued in 1999 by Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, published in Dissent, Spring 2000, pp. 51–65. The influence of this manifesto has extended far beyond Germany and Britain. When Luis Rodriguez-Zapatero was selected to lead the Socialist Workers’ Party of Spain (PSOE) in July 2000, he stated that his leadership would be inspired by the message of the Third Way.

13 This development is not confined to Europe. Parties of the democratic left in such widely scattered countries as New Zealand, Australia, India, Israel, South Africa, and Chile have adopted the strategy of the Third Way. One influential statement of this strategy is found in Giddens, Anthony, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998.Google Scholar

14 For an excellent analysis of the politics of dissent in the populist movement and during the progressive era, see Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999.Google Scholar

15 The rise and rapid decline of the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor which advocated the organization of skilled and unskilled workers into general (industrial) unions is analysed by Voss, Kim, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1993 Google Scholar. He argues that American workers during the 1880s displayed no less solidarity and were no less militant than their European counterparts and that the defeat of the Knights was caused less by cultural and ideological factors than by the ruthless opposition of America’s employer class supported by compliant government and courts.

16 On the fate of American socialism, see Laslett, John H. M. and Lipset, Seymour Martin (eds), Failure of a Dream: Essays in the History of American Socialism, Garden City, NY, Anchor Books, 1974 Google Scholar and S. M. Lipset and G. Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here.

17 In comparison with European industrialized countries where the working class has been organized to compete actively in national politics, Lipset and Marks, op. cit., conclude that ‘the United States combines an extremely high standard of living with exceptionally low levels of taxation and social spending and exceptionally high levels of income inequality and poverty’ (p. 284).

18 Most dramatically, the departure (or expulsion) in 1999 of Oskar Lafontaine, former leader of the SPD, from the Schroder government.

19 The Nader defection from the Democratic Party in the 2000 Presidential election was a protest against the centrist orientation of the party leadership. His vote, though marginal, was sufficient to swing several crucial states, including Florida, into the Bush column, denying vice-President Gore the presidency.

20 Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2000, p. 172.

21 Krieger, David in British Politics in the Global Age: Can Social Democracy Survive”?, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999 Google Scholar, argues that by disconnecting itself from constituencies based on economic interest, class solidarity, collective identity, or ideological commitment, New Labour (and counterpart social democratic parties in Europe) exposes itself to the perils of electoral volatility, as voters have little reason for continuing identification with the party.