The European Social Democrats: Neoliberalism or Internationalism?

Di Donato, Michele

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-06797-6_7

Michele Di Donato⁵

Part of the book series: Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World ((SCCCW))

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the social democratic parties’ approaches to European cooperation in the decisive decade that preceded the signing of the Maastricht Treaty. It discusses the most influential interpretive frameworks that have been put forward by historians and political scientists, assesses possible alternative interpretations, and tries to reflect on their broader implications for the study of the history of the European Left. The paper challenges the interpretations that equate continuing support to European integration with the acceptance of ‘neoliberal’ priorities, and argues instead that this choice can only be understood in the context of the longer-term history of social democratic internationalism.

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Notes

1.
In this chapter, I will generally use ‘social democratic’ and ‘socialist’ as synonyms to identify parties of the non-communist Left that adhered to the Socialist International.
2.
For this approach, see Kevin Featherstone, Socialist Parties and European Integration: A Comparative History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); John Gaffney, ed., Political Parties and the European Union (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Ton Notermans, ed., Social Democracy and Monetary Union (New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2001); Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos, ed., Social Democracy and European Integration: The Politics of Preference Formation (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Lucia Bonfreschi, Giovanni Orsina and Antonio Varsori, eds., European Parties and the European Integration Process, 1945–1992, (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2015); Sante Cruciani, ed., Il socialismo europeo e il processo di integrazione. Dai Trattati di Roma alla crisi politica dell'Unione (1957–2016) (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2016).
3.
Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6.
4.
See, for instance, Francis McGowan, ‘Social Democracy and the European Union: Who Is Changing Whom?’, in Social Democracy: Global and National Perspectives, eds. Luke Martell et al. (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001), 74–106; George Ross, ‘European Center-Lefts and the Mazes of European Integration’, in What’s Left of the Left: Democrats and Social Democrats in Challenging Times, eds. James Cronin, George Ross and James Schoch (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2011), 319–341, esp. 332.
5.
Gerassimos Moschonas, ‘Global Markets, European Constraints: The EU and the Programmatic Destabilization of Social Democracy in Historical Perspective’, in Destabilizing Orders—Understanding the Consequences of Neoliberalism: Proceedings of the MaxPo Fifth-Anniversary Conference Paris, January 12–13, eds. Jenny Andersson and Olivier Godechot (2018), 29. See also Gerassimos Moschonas, ‘Reformism in a ‘Conservative” System: The European Union and Social Democratic Identity’, in In Search of Social Democracy: Responses to Crisis and Modernisation, eds. John Callaghan et al. (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2009), 168–192.
6.
One of the few exceptions is Robert Ladrech, Social Democracy and the Challenge of European Union (Boulder, CO: L. Rienner, 2000).
7.
For a survey of this approach, see Nikola Petrović, ‘The Promethean Role of Europe: Changing Narratives of the Political and Scholarly Left’, National Identities 19, no. 2 (2017), 179–197. On Delors’ narrative, see Alessandra Bitumi, ‘“An Uplifting Tale of Europe”: Jacques Delors and the Contradictory Quest for a European Social Model in the Age of Reagan’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies 3 (2018), 203–221.
8.
David J. Bailey, ‘Obfuscation through Integration: Legitimating ‘New” Social Democracy in the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies 43, no. 1 (2005), 13–35.
9.
See, for example, Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York and London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 721.
10.
See the forum ‘Neoliberalism as a Concept of Contemporary History?’, Journal of Modern European History 4 (2019); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2018).
11.
Daniel T. Rodgers, ‘Reply: Fault Lines’, Dissent, 22 January 2018. See also his ‘The Uses and Abuses of ‘Neoliberalism”’, Dissent, Winter 2018. The article has sparked a lively debate and was criticised by authors who instead defend the value of the definition. See, for one, Quinn Slobodian, ‘Against the Neoliberalism Taboo’, Focaal Blog, 12 January 2018, https://www.focaalblog.com/2018/01/12/quinn-slobodian-against-the-neoliberalism-taboo/ (last accessed 26 March 2020).
12.
Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (London: Verso, 2014); Fritz Scharpf, Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic? (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 43–83.
13.
Philipp Ther, Europe Since 1989: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 146–147, 313.
14.
Kiran Klaus Patel, Projekt Europa. Eine kritische Geschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2018).
15.
Laurent Warlouzet, Governing Europe in a Globalizing World: Neoliberalism and its Alternatives After the 1973 Oil Crisis (New York and London: Routledge, 2017).
16.
Niall Ferguson et al. eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). For a literature review on the 1970s, see Michele Di Donato, ‘Landslides, Shocks, and New Global Rules: The US and Western Europe in the New International History of the 1970s’, Journal of Contemporary History 55, no. 1 (2020), 182–205.
17.
Charles S. Maier, ‘The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twentieth-Century Western Europe’, The American Historical Review 86, no. 2 (1981), 327–352; John G. Ruggie, ‘International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’, International Organization 36, no. 2 (1982), 379–415.
18.
Christian Salm, Transnational Socialist Networks in the 1970s: European Community Development Aid and Southern Enlargement (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016); Aurélie Andry, ‘“Social Europe” in the Long 1970s: The Story of a Defeat’, PhD dissertation, EUI, Florence, 2017. See also Claudia Hiepel, ed., Europe in a Globalising World: Global Challenges and European Responses in the ‘Long’ 1970s (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014).
19.
Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol and Federico Romero, eds., International Summitry and Global Governance: The Rise of the G7 and the European Council, 1974–1991 (London and New York: Routledge 2014); Andry, ‘“Social Europe” in the Long 1970s’.
20.
Mário Soares, A Europa connosco. Dois discursos na cimeira socialista do Porto (Lisbon: Perspectivas & Realidades, 1976). On European socialists and the Iberian transitions, see Mario Del Pero et al., Democrazie. L’Europa Meridionale e la fine delle dittature (Milan: Le Monnier, 2010); Del Pero, ‘“Which Chile, Allende?” Henry Kissinger and the Portuguese Revolution’, Cold War History 11, no. 1 (2011), 1–33; Antonio Muñoz Sanchez, El amigo alemán. El Spd y el Psoe de la dictadura a la democracia (Barcelona: Rba Libros, 2012); David Castaño, ‘“A Practical Test in the Détente”: International Support for the Socialist Party in the Portuguese Revolution (1974–1975)’, Cold War History 15, no. 1 (2015), 1–26; Emma De Angelis and Eirini Karamouzi, ‘Enlargement and the Historical Origins of the European Community’s Democratic Identity, 1961–1978’, Contemporary European History 25, no. 3 (2016), 439–458.
21.
Andry, ‘“Social Europe” in the Long 1970s’, 355.
22.
See Florence Descamps and Laure Quennouëlle-Corre, eds., ‘1983: Un tournant néoliberale?’, special issue of Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 2 (2018). Within the special issue, see especially Mathieu Fulla, ‘Quand Pierre Mauroy résistait avec rigueur au ‘néolibéralisme” (1981–1984)’, 49–63, and Laurent Warlouzet, ‘Le spectre de la crise financière française de 1983. Influences et solidarités européennes’, 93–107. Some of these themes were anticipated in Robert Frank, ‘La gauche et l’Europe’, in Histoire des gauches en France, eds. Jean-Jacques Becker et al. (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 452–472, esp. 465–467.
23.
Fulla, ‘Quand Pierre Mauroy résistait avec rigueur au ‘néolibéralisme"’, 63. For a panorama of the French socialists’ economic debates, see Mathieu Fulla, Les socialistes français et l’économie (1944–1981). Une histoire économique du politique (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 2016).
24.
See Duccio Basosi, ‘The European Community and International Reaganomics, 1981–1985’, in European Integration and the Atlantic Community in the 1980s, eds. Kiran Klaus Patel and Kenneth Weisbrod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 133–153.
25.
Kristina Spohr, The Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the Reshaping of the International Order (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 23–32; Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 245–250.
26.
Jenny Andersson, Between Growth and Security: Swedish Social Democracy from a Strong Society to a Third Way (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
27.
See Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, A Europe Made of Money: The Emergence of the European Monetary System (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Harold James, Making the European Monetary Union: The Role of the Committee of Central Bank Governors and the Origins of the European Central Bank (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012); Michel-Pierre Chélini and Laurent Warlouzet (eds.), Calmer les prix: l’inflation en Europe dans les années 1970 (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2016).
28.
On social democratic internationalism, see Talbot Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For a broader reflection on internationalism, international cooperation and global governance, see Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds., Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).
29.
See Michele Di Donato, ‘Internazionalismo socialdemocratico e storia internazionale degli anni Settanta’, Ventunesimo Secolo 44 (2019), 11–37.
30.
See Mathias Haeussler, ‘A ‘Cold War European”? Helmut Schmidt and European Integration, 1945–1982’, Cold War History 4 (2015), 427–447. For an interpretation of Schmidt as a harbinger of the neoliberal turn of social democracy, see Julian Germann, ‘German ‘Grand Strategy” and the Rise of Neoliberalism’, International Studies Quarterly 58 (2014), 706–716; Giovanni Bernardini, ‘Helmut Schmidt, the ‘Renewal” of European Social Democracy, and the Roots of Neoliberal Globalization’, in Contesting Deregulation: Debates, Practices and Developments in the West Since the 1970s, eds. Knud Andresen and Stefan Müller (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 111–124.
31.
See Bernd Rother, ‘Between East and West—Social Democracy as an Alternative to Communism and Capitalism. Willy Brandt’s Strategy as President of the Socialist International’, in The Crisis of Détente in Europe: From Helsinki to Gorbachev, ed. Leopoldo Nuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 217–229; Willy Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. VIII, Über Europa hinaus: Dritte Welt und Sozialistische Internationale, eds. Bernd Rother and Wolfgang Schmidt (Bonn: Dietz, 2006).
32.
Bitumi, ‘“An Uplifting Tale of Europe’”. See also Laurent Warlouzet’s article in this collection.
33.
Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘Provincialising European Union: Co-operation and Integration in Europe in a Historical Perspective’, Contemporary European History 22, no. 4 (2013), 649–673: 652.
34.
See Gerard Braunthal, ‘The 1989 Basic Program of the German Social Democratic Party’, Polity 25, no. 3 (1993), 375–399.
35.
European currency unit. See Lucia Quaglia’s article in this volume.
36.
Oskar Lafontaine, La società del futuro. Ragioni e prospettive della sinistra in Europa (Venice: Marsilio, 1990 (Hamburg 1988)): The quotes are from 97–112.
37.
Peter Glotz, Manifest für eine neue Europäische Linke (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1985). The quotes are from the Spanish edition, Manifiesto por una nueva izquierda europea. Prólogo de Felipe González (Madrid: Editorial Pablo Iglesias, 1987).
38.
Glotz, Manifiesto por una nueva izquierda europea, 13, 26.
39.
Ibid., 44.
40.
See Mary E. Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
41.
Fondation Jean Jaurès, Centre d’archives socialistes (FJJ, CAS). Secrétariat aux relations internationales, 405 RI 4, ‘Le SPD au Bundestag. Integration de l’Europe occidentale et coopération pan-européenne’, 30 March 1989.
42.
Parti Socialiste, Congrès extraordinaire de l’Arche—La Défense 13, 14 et 15 décembre 1991. The conference proceedings are available at http://www.archives-socialistes.fr. Jospin’s positions largely reflected those of President Mitterrand. See Frédéric Bozo, Mitterrand, la fin de la guerre froide et l’unification allemande: De Yalta à Maastricht (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005).
43.
Parti Socialiste, Congrès extraordinaire de l’Arche.
44.
FJJ, CAS, 405 RI 24, ‘Rencontre du groupe de réflexion franco-allemand sur l’économie du 18 novembre 1988’.
45.
FJJ, CAS, 405 RI 7, ‘Groupe de travail PS-SPD (Paris le 13/12/1988). Relevé de conclusions’.
46.
FJJ, CAS, 450 RI 4, ‘Thèses du SPD sur intégration et coopération paneuropéenne’.
47.
Javier Solana, ‘España-Europa”, Sistema, Revista de ciencias socias 114–115 (1993), 14.
48.
Ibid., 15.
49.
Jenny Andersson, The Library and the Workshop: Social Democracy and Capitalism in the Knowledge Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 7–8.
50.
See Robert Frank’s comments on the French case in ‘Les gauches et l’Europe’, 467–468.
51.
See Nickolas Reinhardt, “A Turning Point in the German EMU Debate: The Baden‐Württemberg Regional Election of March 1996”, German Politics 1 (1997), 77–99.
52.
Stephanie L. Mudge, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Andersson, The Library and the Workshop.
53.
For the general argument, see Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). We still lack comprehensive studies on social democratic parties and human rights.

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Department of Civilizations and Forms of Knowledge, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Michele Di Donato

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Department of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Michele Di Donato
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Silvio Pons

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Di Donato, M. (2023). The European Social Democrats: Neoliberalism or Internationalism?. In: Di Donato, M., Pons, S. (eds) European Integration and the Global Financial Crisis. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06797-6_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06797-6_7
Published: 13 December 2022
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