Brandt, Kreisky and Palme as Policy Entrepreneurs: Social Democratic Networks in Europe’s Policy Towards the Middle East

Abstract

This chapter explores the functions of a specific political network in the context of the Socialist International (SI) between 1973 and 1983.¹ At its core this network consisted of three social democratic politicians: Willy Brandt, chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1969 and 1974 and SI president between 1976 and 1992;² Bruno Kreisky, Austria’s federal chancellor between 1970 and 1983; and Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and again from 1982 to 1986. Previous studies have underlined the importance of this ‘triumvirate’³ within the SI but even biographical accounts⁴ have left the dense mesh of relations that developed between the three protagonists largely untouched. This is not to say that these three did not also form close personal relationships outside the triumvirate with other high-ranking SI members. Brandt, for instance, made it repeatedly clear that French politician François Mitterrand was as close to him as either Kreisky or Palme.⁵ What was unique about those three politicians, however, was the high reciprocity of their mutual esteem and political affinity. In an early publication they tried to draw attention to the symbolic significance of their collaboration.⁶ For them, the SI functioned as an institutionalized transnational clearing house of networks of social democratic and socialist parties and movements, whose tradition dates back to the Second International created in Paris in 1889.