Andrew Scott on the Left in Europe.

Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 New York, Oxford University Press, 2002

The recent positioning of major European nations against the United States of America over the issue of war on Iraq embodies wider differences between Europe as a site of residual social democracy and the rampant neoliberalism associated with the United States. Geoff Eley's 700-page new book reminds us of the strength of the Left's history in Europe, of its lasting legacy in creating such democracy as that continent now enjoys, and the rich resources which remain from the socialist tradition to improve the parched political environment in which we now live. In Forging Democracy, Eley's principal purpose is to demonstrate that democracy in Europe exists today because socialists, feminists, Communists and members of other radical movements began struggling for it in the nineteenth century, and because many parties of the Left continued these struggles in the revolutionary crisis after World War I, defending democracy against fascism from the 1930s and further strengthening democracy after 1945. This ambitious book seeks to comprehensively analyse both main elements of the European Left's history--communism and social democracy. It depicts the rich cultural life which was associated with some of the early political parties of the Left.

Eley is a British historian born in 1949 who was an activist in the European upheavals of 1968 and who since 1979 has been an academic (he is now Professor of Comparative History) at the University of Michigan in the US. He records early on that 'in many ways this book originated in conversations in Cambridge in the later 1970s at a time of far greater optimism than now', with a quality of intellectual friendship that permanently grounded his thinking. Among the participants in those conversations who he explicitly acknowledges as influencing the book's ideas is Australia's Stuart Macintyre. He also acknowledges Eric Hobsbawm's intellectual influence, to the point of declaring that his own writing 'feels like an extended footnote' to Hobsbawm's work. However, as a postwar child of the welfare state Eley is from a younger political generation than Hobsbawm. This shows, for instance, in his very positive and broad-minded treatment of the new social movements which have arisen since the 1960s to challenge, and perhaps supplant, the formal left-wing political parties which were the dominant model of radical politics for the preceding century--including for Hobsbawm's generation, politicised between the World Wars.

From 1860 onwards, Eley emphasises the importance of a north-central social democratic 'core' of Europe comprising particularly Scandinavia and the German speaking nations in which the 'model of socialist parliamentarianism and associated trade unionism dominated labour movements'. Social democracy was weaker in the south and east of Europe, with French-speaking Europe in between. A key variable was liberal constitutionalism.

Where parliamentary traditions were old and popular ideology identified democracy with their strength, as in Britain, Sweden and Denmark, labour movements favoured gradualism or reformism. Where socialists lacked parliamentary representation and the state behaved repressively--as in Iberia, Italy before 1912, the Hungarian half of the Hapsburg Empire, or imperial Russia--labour militancy became intransigent.

Further:

Eurocommunism [later] brought southern Europe into the fold of social democracy ... [nevertheless]from 1900 to the 1960s, Mediterranean Europe had a different labor movement, one shaped by anarcho-syndicalism and then in the Cold War by strong CPs [Communist Parties] marginalized by regimes of the Right. Only after 1960 did southern European Lefts win leverage on government via organized labor followed by electoral growth.

Eley describes how 'in the world economic crisis after 1929, the working-class movements suffered disastrous setbacks when their proudest, largest, and most confident exemplars--in Germany and Austria--went down, crushingly, to defeat'. Only in Scandinavia was democracy secured and it was also there, 'uniquely for the Left ... [that] social democracy governed in the 1930s', 'building the welfare state's legitimacy in expansive national-popular terms ... making social security part of Swedish national identity'. After World War II, 'the strongest parties ... [continued to be] in Scandinavia, where Swedish, Norwegian and Danish socialists won repeated elections with programs of structural reform based on liberal democracy, mixed economies, trade union corporatism, and strong welfare states'. He downplays the scope and value of the Attlee Labour Government's specific achievements in Britain from 1945-51, although he nevertheless emphasises the positive general gains made by the Left in Europe after World War Two: 'the postwar settlement transitioned from liberal democratic ideals of 1789 ... toward social democracy and rights in the socio-economic sphere'.

From the outset Eley strongly criticises the European Left's failure to include women as equals, attacking socialist parties' implication in a 'maternalist consensus' which left so many 'territories that socialists didn't map, especially in sexuality, reproductive freedoms, family and personal life'. He makes a very positive assessment of the gains made by Russian women after the Revolution and by Eastern European women after World War II, and documents the losses for women, particularly in East Germany, with the dismantling of the welfare state after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

The Bolshevik revolution warrants particular attention, with Eley inclining to those scholars who emphasise its widespread social base. He does, however, recognise that 'Lenin sanctioned much that eased Stalinism's arrival' while contending that it was only under Stalin that democracy and socialism were really expunged from the Soviet Union and then Eastern Europe. He deeply regrets 'the fateful split in socialism' from 1917 and argues that:

The catastrophic contribution of the mutual enmity between social democrats and Communists to the early triumphs of fascism can hardly be overstated. The Soviet example was the greatest weapon the Right could ever have wanted against the Left in Western Europe.

But at the same time it was fear of Bolshevism that encouraged non-socialist governments to make major democratic concessions to militant working class movements in many parts of Europe. He also interestingly suggests that if Soviet-style 'socialism' 'laid down anything lasting in the political cultures of eastern Europe, it was a complex of powerful popular expectations about the state's responsibilities for society'; and that 'a guaranteed basic income, free ... equal access to education, cheap ... accessible services, protections for jobs, these issues describe ... the political space where post-Communist Lefts might grow'.

Eley's own conclusions about the Left's current condition and prospects are in many ways very pessimistic. While recognising the predominance of neoliberal policies throughout Europe in the 1980s and 1990s he also rightly highlights that alternatives to these neoliberal trends were still functioning in parts of Scandinavia, West Germany, Holland, Austria and France. His view of corporatism is somewhat inconsistent: while often implying a critical view, his description of outcomes achieved by various Left approaches on practical policies--such as the Swedish Social Democratic Party's delivery of social reforms and full employment after WWII in exchange for wage restraint for economic reconstruction--concedes some benefits.

Eley's discussion of the European Left's present and future is marred however by his uncritical acceptances of a clear distinction between 'industry' and 'services' in the workforce, and of the term 'post-industrial'; his inclination to a traditional and therefore narrow definition of the working class; his ready acceptance of certain political scientists' postulations that there has been a sociologically determined 'decline of class' voting in recent decades; and his acceptance also of Inglehart's questionable demarcation between 'materialist' and 'post-materialist' concerns. Nevertheless, Eley remains perceptive in analysing the rise and spread of Green parties. A Green Party Leader, Joschka Fischer, is now Germany's foreign minister and was one of Europe's leading spokespersons against the US-led war on Iraq. As Eley points out, 'by the 1990s ... [Green] parties were credible coalition partners, with extensive governing experience in the cities. Their importance exceeded the modesty of their electorate.'

Eley demonstrates an impressive knowledge of labour history across Europe and makes effective and moving use of individual biographies of rank-and-file figures to illustrate the wider histories of which they were part. Drawing upon this excellent historical analysis, he concludes that the socialist values of collectivism, social justice, egalitarianism, mutualism and democracy remain the best basis for Europe's political future. The lessons which can be drawn from the successes and failures in the long history of political parties in the European Left, together with a realistic appraisal of the potential and limits of the European Left's more recent and emerging political forms, are now vitally relevant to the future political choices of the entire world.

Andrew Scott is a lecturer in the School of Social Science and Planning at RMIT University.