The Europeanization of Social Democracy: Politics without Policy and Policy without Politics

Abstract

Social Democratic Parties in Europe have suffered at the polls in recent years. The disastrous performance of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the 2009 German federal election inspired a raft of political commentary, from Der Spiegel to the British Financial Times, which speculated about the ‘end of social democracy’.¹ For some, the eventual defeat of the British Labour Party in May 2010 further supported this hypothesis.² The failure of Social Democratic Parties in national elections was replicated by their poor performance in the 2009 European Parliament election. Although social democracy is certainly in decline when compared to the highpoint it reached in 2000, when centre-left parties were in power in 12 out of the then 15 European Union (EU) member states, this dire narrative is exaggerated, because it ignores the cyclical nature of party politics (Paterson and Sloam, 2010). Between 1993 and 1997 social democrats were in opposition in the EU ‘big three’ (France, Germany, and the UK) (Merkel, 1992), and since the formation of the conservative/liberal democrat government in the UK in May 2010 we are back in the same situation. Today we should therefore talk of the retreat rather than the defeat of European social democracy, and certainly not about its end. A more interesting fact is that mainstream Conservative and Christian Democrat Parties have not profited very much from the decline in fortunes of their main competitors — indeed, voters have turned away in droves from ‘catch-all parties’ of left and right (Paterson and Sloam, 2010). Nevertheless, recent economic, political and social trends have proved particularly problematic for the centre-left across Europe.