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Whats Left of the Left: Liberalism and Social Democracy in a

Globalized World

Editors and organizersJames Cronin, Boston College


George Ross, Brandeis University
James Shoch, California State UniversitySacramento

On May 9-10 the Center for European Studies at Harvard University will host a
meeting on Whats Left of the Left. The event is a working conference designed
to help produce an edited volume on the fate, state and prospects of the center-left in
Europe and the United States. We shall discuss draft essays for the volume and in
the process identify central themes and questions for the introduction and
conclusion of the volume and for the final versions of the articles slated to appear in
the book, which will be published in 2009 by Duke University Press. Below is the
original project proposal.

Three crises
Sometime in the 1970s the long postwar boom came to an end for Western economies.
Slowing growth produced rising unemployment and inflation, a stagflation that in
theory was not supposed to happen. The slump that followed ended the Keynesian era,
with its consensual assumptions about running the economy and about the compatibility
of a large state sector, high public expenditure, and prosperity. Neo-liberal, pro-market
ideas conquered beachheads among public servants, politicians, economists and the
media. For labor and social-democratic parties throughout the industrial world, including
for this study the Democratic Party in the U.S., Keynesian theory had made it possible to
maintain that market-constraining social and economic policies, including large welfare
states, protective labor laws, and an active state, were good for the economy, for society,
and for the national interest. With Keynesianism challenged, this understanding of the
public good was no longer compelling. Moreover, ascendant neoliberalism reversed
Keynesian assumptions, asserting in their stead that large government, planning, high
taxes and social spending were antithetical to growth and that programs only recently
considered worthy and feasible were now obstacles to prosperity.

The sorry fate of the Labour, Democratic or social-democratic governments that had the
bad luck to be in power during the 1970s or early 1980s demonstrated how completely
the economic problems of the era had undermined the reigning policy paradigm. In
Britain, the Callaghan government faced oil shocks by adopting incomes policies that its
core supporters rejected utterly, leading to the election of Margaret Thatcher and nearly
two decades of Conservative rule. In the US, Jimmy Carter, facing economic and foreign
policy crises, was equally ineffective and also prepared a turn to the Right in 1980. In
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France, the Mitterrand government elected in 1981 and committed to strong Keynesian,
statist reforms, rapidly retreated on almost every front. Center-left parties everywhere had
difficulty adapting their repertoire of economic and social policies to the problems with
which voters were concerned.

The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the disappearance in 1991 of the
Soviet Union itself further narrowed the political space within which the center-left could
operate. These dramatic events effectively put paid to what remained of any 19th-century
vision of replacing capitalism with a wholly different social and economic system. There
was irony in this, because the center-left had long been at pains to distance itself from
communism and actually existing socialism. But in fact, while western democratic
socialists and reformers had vehemently deplored the illiberal, antidemocratic practices
of communism, they nonetheless held many beliefs and predispositions in common with
their communist rivals. They often shared a utopian antipathy to capitalism as a system
and a culture, a vague but powerful desire to see it transcended, faith in public ownership
and planning, plus strong support for policies guaranteeing jobs, housing, health care and
education to the entire population. What happened between 1989 and 1991 forced a
reckoning with the socialist past and its entire way of thinking about the world. The
dream of transcending capitalism effectively ended and life within it now looked
permanent, dictating a much more restricted definition of what was politically possible
and desirable.

The effects of globalization have been quite as powerful. Expanding world trade,
opening product and financial markets, and heightened capital mobility placed new limits
on how national states could manage economies, protect workers and their environments,
and pursue fiscal policies intended to provide social services. The new constraints of
globalization were in part discursive or ideological, of course. Motivated by either
sincere belief or strategic ambition, politicians and intellectuals now ruled out all sorts of
policy options because of the supposed dictates of the global economy. The reality
beneath the rhetoric was nevertheless sobering enough. The global economy and new
technologies did in fact make it easier to move capital and jobs to places with fewer
restrictions and lower labor costs and, quite as important, allowed employers to threaten
such moves. Business more broadly could insist that an increasingly global economic
environment required states to adopt the fiscal, monetary, and regulatory politics that
business interests favored.

and the center-left


These three massive changes have combined to narrow significantly the options available
to all political parties, but especially to parties of the center-left. Adapting to these new
constraints has been further complicated because the social bases of politics have also
shifted. In the past, center-left parties and movements were routinely grounded in the
industrial working class, especially its most organized sectors and occupations, even if
electoral success also required support from the middle and professional classes. The
size of the working class has shrunk everywhere in the advanced societies, however, and
its composition has been altered. Manufacturing has declined steadily and employment

growth has shifted into services. Industry, long the bastion of trade union strength, has
relocated away from the developed countries. Male labor force participation has dropped
slightly as a result and the rate for women has steadily expanded. Rising living standards
have also blurred the line between workers and the lower-middle class, while service
sector work is often hard to categorize as either blue- or white-collar, manual or nonmanual. The demographic underpinnings for what Eric Hobsbawm once labeled the
forward march of labour, and hence of parties linked to labor, have dissipated.

As the social base of liberal, labor and social-democratic parties has been transformed, so
has the problem of connecting with voters and constituents. New worlds of political
campaigning have opened up at the same time that many of the networks and associations
linking parties to voters trade unions especially have atrophied. Modern public
relations -- the personalization of candidates, sophisticated polling, television
campaigning and the internet -- introduce layers of expertise and professional electoral
manipulation into political life with which established parties of the left (and the right)
often feel uncomfortable. Parties of the center-left are on principle no less capable of
making use of such new techniques than others, but they may have more qualms and
hesitations than their opponents typically display.

Parties of the center-left nevertheless remain electoral players capable of winning


elections. The economic, political, and cultural constraints we have been discussing have
not fully eliminated the political space for strategies and policies beyond the neoliberal
paradigm. In particular, supply-side socialist alternatives to Keynesian demand

management strategies have produced successes and, absent severe macroeconomic


shocks, generated levels of growth, employment, and other benefits sufficient to produce
repeated electoral victories. Policies aimed at and premised on delivering economic
growth have thus remained important. They have not dominated center-left
policymaking quite as in the past, however, and new issues, with new constituencies
behind them, have become more prominent. This is due in part to the fact that the same
economic processes that have led to fewer manual workers have produced more whitecollar professionals who can be mobilized by the center-left on issues that are more social
or cultural. The increase in womens employment likewise contains possibilities as well
as challenges. The declining significance of class more broadly creates room for a
politics that includes questions of racial or sexual equality, war and peace, the
environment, and lifestyles that cut across electorates differently than earlier class
cleavages. Center-left parties have long debated the electoral significance of such shifts,
by now they have come to understand them reasonably well, and they have begun to
incorporate new issues into their electoral appeals and programs with considerable
success.

The shifting bases of political allegiance nevertheless combine with the new constraints
on center-left politics to vastly complicate the task of putting together stable and longterm coalitions, making it simultaneously harder to develop policies to bring together
fragmented and heterogeneous constituencies and then to govern effectively. In the
policy realm, for example, center-left parties especially in Europe -- have to adapt to
new monetary policies that prioritize price stability and rule out counter-cyclical

spending, constraints limiting their ability to reward old and new constituencies. They
also confront difficult issues of welfare state reform prompted in part by aging
populations that have produced skewed pension dependency ratios and that contribute to
rapidly rising healthcare costs. They must also devise programs in response to new social
needs -childcare for new single-parent and two breadwinner families and support
programs for the working poor, for example. Most controversially, they are expected to
promote new labor market flexibility without undermining employment security, reform
industrial relations institutions, and promote new patterns of capital-labor cooperation.
An equally difficult challenge involves reforming educational systems to promote lifelong learning, training and re-training. Finally, they need to find new revenue sources
without damaging national economies engaged in global competition. These strategic
dilemmas have created new political minefields.
The book and its goals
The book will explore the post-Keynesian, post-Cold War, globalized political context
that confronts the center-left and assess its consequences and implications. It is premised
on a belief that lamenting the recent narrowing of debate or decrying as betrayal the
acceptance of new constraints are unhelpful responses. Instead, it will probe the new
political opportunity structures faced by the center-left with an eye towards realizing,
seizing and expanding the political possibilities they offer. One can imagine in theory a
creative politics that would find ways to open new paths and transcend limitations, but it
would have to proceed by acknowledging the context within which creativity can occur
and the realities it needs to transform. The book will seek to discover how much of this
creativity can actually be found in contemporary center-left efforts to respond to the new

political landscape and how such creativity can be explained and perhaps expanded. We
shall thus investigate the more successful initiatives, inquire as to when and where they
have occurred, what conditions facilitated the most useful responses as well as what
barriers have been blocking their emergence in other places, and what their limitations
might be even where they have been politically possible.

The book will begin by exploring the origins and the dimensions of the new political
world in which the center-left must operate. It will then proceed with a series of essays
dealing with different countries, parties and policy realms. In what we hope is a
significant innovation, we will seek to look both at policy and at the question of winning
elections. In terms of policy, a special focus will be on the variety of programs and
policies that can be grouped under the heading of supply-side socialism. In terms of
voting and winning office, the focus will be on efforts at forging new and expanded
electoral coalitions. At least two other tasks will run through and inform the book: one
will be to pose the question of whether there are alternative visions for the center-left that
have yet to be fully explored or even imagined; the other will be to identify threats and
challenges that the center-left will have to confront if its more positive vision is to
prevail. A bit of further explanation on each of these points seems in order.

Our first focus will be on recent emphasis on developing the supply side as the
appropriate response to a more competitive world economy that one finds in many places.
Put simply, if the center-left is no longer able to steer the economy by managing demand
to generate permanent jobs, it can nevertheless affect levels of growth and employment

by investing in research and development, facilitating the creation of new jobs, and
especially improving the skills of workers and providing help through the life course
transitions that new occupational flexibility implies. In Sweden, for example,
government is committed to getting people to work and to high rates of labor force
participation for both men and women. This requires an open economy geared to exports
and sufficiently flexible to respond to changing consumer tastes, shifting technologies
and foreign competition. In such an economy, workers are expected to move from one
job to another, with the state facilitating such transitions through income support, social
services and training. What the Danish call flexicurity has similar goals. In Britain,
New Labour has deployed a similar rationale in its so-called new deal designed to
move people from welfare to work, but the British case is different because, absent a
commitment to equality of outcome, support levels have been less generous and training
less effective than in the Scandinavian cases. The European Union, using soft law
instruments like the open method of coordination, has also become an advocate of such
supply-side methods.

The arguments behind such supply-side socialist initiatives are heard in the United
States and in other European countries like France, Italy or even Germany, but practice
lags far behind. Neither jobs nor workers are easily protected in an American context
where rapidly growing inequality and a large working poor population may render the
approach ineffective or altogether impossible, however enthusiastic its advocates may be.
In places like France and Germany, social and institutional barriers to the coordination
and cooperation necessary for the supply-side socialist approach have been hard to

overcome. In these settings both jobs and workers have traditionally been protected and
major mobilizations have blocked change when either has been threatened, effectively
tying the center-lefts hands by vetoing its policy initiatives.

The supply-side approach would seem to represent the most intellectually attractive and
compelling center-left policy response to the new constraints. There are nonetheless
questions to be asked about how robust the vision is, what conditions are required to
make it possible, and how effective the policies are even when they are in place. There is
also, of course, the much broader question of what other objectives this focus might
neglect? In particular, are there better or different starting points that the center-left is, or
should be, exploring i.e., should it seek to create a politics centered on social issues,
environmental concerns or new definitions of social needs? Various contributions to the
book will seek to assess the value of various supply-side initiatives from both of these
vantage points.

Our second major focus will be more expressly on the quest for center-left voters.
Evidence for the merits of this emphasis can be found in the surprisingly resilient
electoral performance of center-left parties. Despite the unprecedented constraints they
have faced, parties of the center-left have won elections and held office on a fairly regular
basis since the 1980s. They have not prevailed as often as their center-right opponents
and have not formed governments as routinely as they did a generation ago, but, given
the enormous difficulties they confront, their record in elections has held up remarkably
well.

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The United States is an example whose lessons are of interest in part because they are so
counter-intuitive. There Democrats have suffered a series of historic defeats and
performed poorly in office, but have still managed to win large numbers of votes and
frequent elections by putting together coalitions united mainly by whom and what they
oppose. At the center of such alliances have been African-Americans and other
minorities, joined by what remains of a labor movement and by women and professionals
repelled by Republican stances on social issues. In the past the potential for such a
diverse coalition was much derided on the grounds that simply adding up minorities
seldom produced real majorities and that when and where it did, the coalition would not
hold together enough to allow effective governance. We would propose to interrogate this
view and explore to what extent a new center-left politics might be developed by
assembling a variety of potentially fragmented but expanding constituencies and
proceeding to elaborate programs and policies.

Such a project would be more likely to succeed, both electorally and in terms of
governance, the more the rewards from participating were symbolic rather than material.
Here the current economic context, in which redistribution is difficult because it is such a
zero-sum game and might also threaten growth, may indirectly facilitate a shift of focus
to political trade-offs that are not entirely material. The likelihood of success would be
further enhanced if those whose first priority was the assembling of a winning coalition
should make their next priority the creation of a new inventory of needs. There is already
a large body of work by scholars and policy-makers on the development of new risks and

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new social needs. If these distinct efforts toward the creation of new coalitions and
towards the identification and satisfaction of new needs -- could be integrated, the politics
of the center-left might well be reinvigorated. The book will seek specifically to work
out what connections would need to be made for this to happen and to identify projects
and initiatives that have already begun the process.

Other possibilities need to be considered as well, and assessing them will be a thirs, if
often implicit, task of the book. It is an over-simplification to say that earlier center-left
politics were all about economic issues and that the successes of the Keynesian era were
based on the ability simultaneously to engineer growth and redistribute its proceeds, but
there is nonetheless truth to the claim. Would a new politics be possible and successful if
it were underpinned by a coherent vision based upon some new issue that was less about
growth and more about the quality of life? Anthony Crosland tried to come up with such
a vision half a century ago in his The Future of Socialism (1956) and emphasized the
matter of equality. It didnt take. Is it possible that the new inequalities of contemporary
capitalism might spark a revival of interest in equality and redistribution?

Or is something comparable, but possibly more effective, possible in the post-Keynesian,


post-socialist and globalized political world? Not long ago citizenship was advanced
as a promising alternative: the idea was to emphasize common citizenship, broaden its
reach, and expand its meaning to include a broader array of social rights. For various
reasons this, too, did not catch on. Could fears of global warming and protection of the
environment inspire and mobilize the center-left? If so, it would seem to require an

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environmental politics with a far broader appeal than green politics has offered until now.
Might the focus be anti-globalization? If so, resistance to globalization would have to
overcome its fundamentally negative incarnation and its identification with the
privileged, professional classes of the most prosperous societies. Is there something else?
The intuition that informs this book suggests that there is probably no single big idea
capable of doing the work that the demands for economic security, redistribution and
growth did for social democracy and political liberalism in the postwar era, but the
question requires investigation if only to underline what is and what is not possible.

Finally, and more ominously, it is at least theoretically possible that post-Keynesian, post
Cold War, post-globalization circumstances may be undermining center-left prospects in
dangerous, perhaps even terminal, ways. However unpleasant it is to contemplate, a
serious analysis of the center-lefts prospects must take such possibilities into account
and explain how they can be avoided. In parts of continental Europe, often those where
the center-left was never really hegemonic during the golden age (sometimes because of
the presence of strong Communist parties) anti-liberal, economic nationalist, groups on
the left and xenophobic anti-immigrant movements on the right may combine to make the
center-lefts path to power very difficult or to compromise its ability to formulate
coherent political and policy alternatives altogether. The first alternative may be visible
in smaller states on the European continent (the Netherlands, Belgium), the latter in
France and Italy. Neither is to be welcomed. And whatever forms these threats take, the
center-left requires policies that can address the fears on which they are based while
refusing the logic of their illiberal solutions.

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Outline
The book we propose will consist of a series of linked chapters informed by the analysis
and questions outlined above. It will be structured in part around the expertise of its
editors. George Ross will bring his extensive knowledge of the European Union and of
French politics to bear on the options available for European social democrats. James
Cronin, who has written on the comparative politics of the Cold War and on New Labour
in Britain, will work at developing the appropriate historical framework within which to
situate the specific questions addressed in the volume. He will also look closely at the
policies of New Labour as one reasonably coherent, if still controversial, effort to put
together a post-Keynesian social-democratic program. James Shoch, whose prior work
has centered on the partisan character of American trade policy, will make it his job to
bring the American experience within the books framework and also examine the
uneven record of Democratic ventures in trade and competitiveness policy. The editors
will set out the problems to be addressed and the variety of responses in an introduction,
they will also contribute individual essays based on their particular areas of expertise, and
they will summarize the results in the books conclusion.

The editors will also connect and put in context chapters by other scholars. We have
recruited contributors with detailed knowledge of particular regions and states and with
expertise on policy-making, on parties and on elections. Roughly a third of the
contributions will focus on the United States; another third, perhaps a bit more, will
explore various European cases, defined by country or region and/or by policy area; and
the remainder, including the introduction and conclusion, will be comparative or

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thematic. The book will be distinguished primarily by its argument and approach:
specifically, it will differ from other titles in its historical grounding, its transatlantic
reach, its comparative perspective, its simultaneous focus on politics and policy; and its
determination to carry the analysis forward to the present.

There are a number of admirably broad studies on the center-left that unfortunately tend
to end chronologically at roughly the point where our volume will begin. These works
also focus almost exclusively on Europe.1 In addition, there are a number of very good
studies of the prospects of social democracy in sustaining electoral coalitions or in
achieving success in key policy areas: i.e., in generating growth, in managing industrial
relations and in maintaining welfare states in the face of the new constraints.2 Our

One classic example of this is Fritz Scharpfs Crisis and Choice in European Social Democracy (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1987), which treats only the end of the Keynesian-post-war boom years. Other
large-scale and important studies including Stefano Bartolinis The Political Mobilization of the
European Left 1860-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), Donald Sassoons One Hundred Years of
Socialism (New York: New Press, 1998), and Geoff Eleys Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in
Europe, 1850-2000 (Oxford: OUP 2002) -- bring their stories to a close at roughly similar points. Herbert
Kitschelts Transformation of European Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) is an
impressive analysis whose focus is primarily on parties and voting, rather than policy, and its database
may now be somewhat out-of-date. Gerassimos Moschonas In the Name of Social Democracy: The Great
Transformation from 1945 to the Present (London: Verso, 2002) comes closest chronologically to what we
propose, even if it remains European in its focus, but Moschonas presence among our list of contributors
indicates that he has a great deal more to say.
2

See, for good examples on parties and politics, Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy
and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2006). Carles Boix, Political Parties, Growth
and Equality: Conservative and Social Democratic Economic Strategies in the World Economy
(Cambridge, 1998) Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2002); as well as two important earlier studies: Frances Fox Pivens Labor
Parties in Postindustrial Societies (Oxford: OUP, 1992) and Perry Anderson and Patrick Camillers
Mapping the West European Left (London: Verso, 1994). There is also an extensive literature on policy
areas that is pertinent. On economic policy per se, see Andrew Glyn, Social Democracy in Neoliberal
Times: The Left and Economic Policy since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). On social
policy and the welfare state there is a huge literature. See, for example, Paul Pierson, ed., The New Politics
of the Welfare State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Geoffrey Garrett, Partisan Politics in the
Global Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alexander Hicks, Social Democracy and
Welfare Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Duane Swank, Global Capital, Political
Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2002); Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens, Development and Crisis in the Welfare State

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contention, however, is that the critical junctures and processes we have identified are
broad in their impact and cumulative in their effects, and they cut across both the
electoral prospects of the centre-left and its policy effectiveness. Most important, they
make the European and American center-left dilemmas more similar than they once were,
hence the shape, the geographic reach, and time period chosen for the proposed volume.

Alongside the literature focused upon the center-left, a number of interesting studies
conceived and executed near the end of the Cold War rightly and thoughtfully concluded
that it constituted a crisis of the left more narrowly conceived and of Marxism as a
philosophical outlook and guide to politics. To judge by a recent survey of the
intellectual state of the left, the crisis would seem to be very much ongoing.3 Our
concern here, however, is more precisely with labor and social-democratic parties and
movements that, though constrained in new ways, remain a viable force for winning
elections and implementing policy. In fact, the crisis of the left of the early 1990s was
followed by a resurgence of the moderate or center-left in the mid-1990s and a renewed
sense of possibility. It was a time when Clinton and Blair could talk about a third way,
when Blair and Schroeder could co-author a book of that title, and when a Socialist prime
minister in France could argue for a position further to the left of that. The moment was
short-lived and undoubtedly filled with illusions, but it signaled the possibility that even

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Miguel Glatzer and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds.,
Globalization and the Future of the Welfare State (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,2005); Jonas
Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe Vs. Liberal America (Princeton: Princeton University
Press) plus recent contributions on Europe by Gsta Esping-Anderson, The Three Worlds of Welfare
Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), and Why We Need a New Welfare State
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); as well as those by Maurizio Ferrara, Colin Crouch, Anthony
Giddens, Roger Liddle, and others.
3
See Gran Therborns extensive but ultimately very depressing review, After Dialectics: Radical Social
Theory in a Post-Communist World, New Left Review, 43 (January-February, 2007).

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in a post-Keynesian, post-Cold War and highly globalized world, there was still a role for
what Europeans call social democracy and Americans label liberalism.4

In general, then, our aim in this book is to help todays students and practitioners of
politics base their analyses and strategies on realistic assessments of the historical
constraints that shape the paths along which political progress can occur. We do so in the
belief that a careful study of the existing structure of political opportunity can make
progress easier and faster and ensure that its potential is fully realized; and in the further
hope that the limitations that we must acknowledge as the beginning of wisdom might
nevertheless, in the end, be transcended.

See, for example, Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright, eds., The New Social Democracy (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999).

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Whats Left of the Left: Liberalism and Social Democracy in a Globalized World

Edited by -James Cronin, Boston College


George Ross, Brandeis University
James Shoch, California State UniversitySacramento

Table of Contents (with paper summaries)*


1. James Cronin, James Shoch, George Ross, Introduction: Liberalism and Social
Democracy after Keynes, after Communism and after the WTO.
The introduction to the volume will spell out in detail the historical and structural
constraints under which the center-left has increasingly been forced to operate over the
past two decades and the variety of responses that have evolved, or that can be imagined,
to deal with this new historical context.
2. Sheri Berman, Social Democracys Historic Achievement
These days the term social democracy has been stripped of all concrete referents and
transformed into a content-free label. The main goal of this paper is to show that social
democracy should be seen as a distinctive ideology and movement all its own, built on a
belief in the primacy of politics and social solidarity and representing a non-Marxist
vision of socialism. Revealing social democracys true ideological and political contours
can help social scientists gain insight into one of the most important yet least understood
political movements of the twentieth century, and also provide a fresh perspective on
critical contemporary debates such as those over politics in an age of globalization and
the future of the left in advanced industrial democracies.
Sheri Berman is associate professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia
University, in New York City. She has written The Social Democratic Moment: Ideas
and Politics in the Making of Inter-War Europe (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1998) and The Primacy of Politics Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Europe:
3. George Ross, Does the European Union aid, or stifle, social democracy?
The EU has intervened in the lives of European social democrats in multiple ways. At
times it has been greeted as a saving barrier to neo-liberal economic change and

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globalization that might allow social democracy to regroup and reform the European
model of society. At other times it has been seen as a dangerous and effective agent for
neo-liberalism and globalization. Where lies the truth, and what can a fragmented and
uncertain social democratic movement do with this truth?
George Ross is Hillquit Professor in Labor and Social Thought and Director of the Center
for European Studies at Brandeis University, USA, Senior Faculty Associate of the
Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, USA, and
Professeur Associ of the Chaire Jean Monnet and Department of Political Science of the
University of Montreal, Canada. He is the author of Jacques Delors and European
Integration (London: Polity, 1995), and editor, with Andrew Martin, of The Brave New
World of European Unions (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 1999) and Euros and
Europeans: EMU and the European Social Model (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005)
4. Jonas Pontusson, "The German model is dead, long live Social Democracy!"
Does the social democratic project presuppose German-style "social market institutions,"
as the varieties of capitalism school claims? Comparative evidence shows that it
doesn't, and that many social democratic policies can be viable, economically, in a more
"liberal" setting. Successfully achieving a social democratic project obviously represents
a challenge, but German-style social market institutions do not necessarily facilitate the
mobilization of social groups that stand to gain most from social democratic policies, as
the Swedish, German and British experiences over the last 10-15 years shows.
Jonas Pontusson is Professor of Political Science at Princeton University. He has
written, most recently, Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe Vs. Liberal America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)
5. Gerassimos Moschonas, Socialism and its changing constituencies in France, Spain,
Germany and Greece: What can be salvaged?
European social democracy has had to confront rapidly changing conditions in its social
and electoral base. Workers are declining, the new middle classes are stressed, the
gauche caviare is fickle, while gauchisme and populism are constant threats to social
democratic coherence. What have European social democrats been able to make of this?
Gerassimos Moschonas is Professor of Political Science at Pantheon University in
Athens, Greece, and visiting Professor at the Institute for European Studies, Free
University of Brussels. He is the author of In the Name of Social Democracy: The Great
Transformation from 1945 to the Present (London: Verso, 2002)
6. George Ross and Arthur Goldhammer, The end of the left in France?
The French center-left has suffered a series of devastating reversals in the first decade of
the 21st century. Defeat has brought in its train dissent, discord and proposals for
reshaping the appeal and programme that have guided French socialism in recent
decades. Debate centers in particular on whether the French social model is inimical to
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growth and, in the context of global economic pressure, affordable. More broadly, is
French socialism or social democracy condemned to being a backward-looking force,
defending what is under threat but incapable of crafting policies for the future? George
Ross will survey what merits defending, what needs to be abandoned, and the prospects
for getting the right mix of old and new.
The French Socialist party, Ross and Goldhammer will argue, has had to cope very
directly with the crisis of the 1970s, the end of the Cold War, and the coming of
globalization and its responses illustrate well the difficulties and pitfalls of the CenterLeft in such turbulent circumstances. In the 1940s and 1950s the socialists had been
marginalized ideologically and electorally by its Cold War centrist pro-Americanism. In
the 1960s, its leadership was taken over by Francois Mitterrand following a prescient
insight that electoral and programmatic alliances with the Communists would ultimately
favor the Socialists. The strategy worked to lead to a Mitterrand presidency, left-center
government after 1981, and rapid electoral decline of the Communist ally.
The initial price of the strategy was a program of Keynesianism, nationalizations, and
planning more appropriate to 1945 than to the 1980s. Enacting this program, when
governments across Europe and in the United States were shifting to anti-inflationary
policies, led France to the brink of financial and economic disaster and necessitated an
abrupt policy change. The Socialists in power were able to weather this change and to
engineer a turn to price stability, but only at the cost of low growth and high
unemployment which would of course hurt its own supporters the most. Despite their
changed policies, however, the Socialists retained their fundamental strategy. The
results, over time, were a slow decline of voting support and the disaffection of loyalists
of the traditional left who came naturally to mistrust the Socialists. Another result was
increased anti-immigrant xenophobia and worries about social insecurity, enhanced by
the consequences of the end of the Cold War, in particular the rapid enlargement of the
European Union so as to include former Communist countries. A third was an intense
anxiety about globalization.
The French Center-Left now lives in an extremely difficult and contradictory situation.
In the 2002 presidential elections, Lionel Jospin neglected to appeal to the traditional left
before running to the center and so was eliminated, even though his main opponent, the
incumbent Jacques Chirac, had proven that he had no answers to Frances problems. In
2007, the campaign of Sgolne Royal was sabotaged from both left and the center of the
Socialist Party. The response was a pattern of transparent triangulation such that her
campaign positions were simultaneously too Left-conservative and too unclear. French
social democracy, this essay will argue, is a living laboratory for observing the
consequences of the constraints and dilemmas addressed in this book.
George Ross has studied the French left for many years and written extensively on its
problems and prospects. Among his many contributions are Workers and Communists in
France: From Popular Front to Eurocommunism (1982); and The Mitterand Experiment,
edited with Stanley Hoffman and Sylvia Mazacher (1987).

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Arthur Goldhammer is a translator specializing in French history, literature,


philosophy, and social science. He has translated more than a hundred works by many of
Frances most noted authors. Goldhammer is an affiliate of the Center for European
Studies at Harvard University, where he hosts the Centers seminar for visiting scholars.
He is on the editorial board of the journal French Politics, Culture and Society and in
1996 was named Chevalier de lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of
Culture. In 1997, he was awarded the Mdaille de Vermeil by the Acadmie Franaise.
He is working on a book about democracy after Tocqueville, whose Democracy in
America he translated in 2004 and for which he received the Florence Gould Translation
Prize, as well as on a novel about American physicists in Europe on the eve of World
War II. He is also translating a new book by Pierre Rosanvallon and a collection of the
writings of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, as well as a new translation
of Tocquevilles LAncien Rgime et la Rvolution. In addition, he hosts a blog on
French politics at artgoldhammer.blogspot.com.
7. James Cronin, Is New Labour a model for anything or anybody?
New Labour came into office in 1997 after four consecutive general election defeats that
produced nearly two decades of Tory rule. Chastened by its past failures, New Labour
felt itself severely constrained in what it might do and in what it could therefore promise
its supporters. While adapting to this landscape of constraint, New Labour nevertheless
worked hard to find policies that would, directly or indirectly, advance what it understood
to be the social-democratic project. Perhaps inevitably, it has disappointed, and it has
been criticized for betraying its history and values; and in the post-Blair era there will
surely be a wide-ranging debate about the partys future. This essay will address two
questions: first, have New Labours efforts to modernise social democracy constituted a
useful updating of the tradition or have they effectively severed the connection; and
second, do New Labour initiatives in foreign and security policy, anti-terrorism policies
and on immigration represent a principled social-democratic response to these new issues
or a capitulation to a more traditional, conservative approach?
James Cronin is Professor of History at Boston College. He is an associate of the
Center for European Studies at Harvard University and is presently Visiting Fellow at the
Centre for Contemporary British History, Institute of Historical Research, at the
University of London. His most recent book is New Labour's Pasts: The Labour Party
and Its Discontents (London: Longman, 2004). Among his earlier books are The World
the Cold War Made (London: Routledge,1996); and The Politics of State Expansion:
War, State and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1991).
8. Jean-Michel de Waele, Free University of Brussels, Is there/can there be, a new
social democracy in central and eastern Europe?
Central and Eastern European societies missed the Keynesian period and its legacy and
saw any true semblance of social democracy surgically removed in their Cold War period
of communist domination. Since the end of the Cold War they have had to rebuild
democratic and partisan life in a period marked by the constraints of a globalizing world
economy and in a context in which substantial and largely unfavorable baggage attaches
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to any movement or party of the left or center-left. The long era of material deprivation
imposed by the failure of Soviet-style economic policy has also meant that the resources
required for policies traditionally associated with social democracy and the center-left
have not been available. In this context, what kinds of social democratic politics have
emerged; and what varieties might be capable of emerging in this hugely important but
still damaged part of Europe?
Jean-Michel de Waele is Chair of the Political Science Department and Associate of the
Institute for European Studies at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. He is the
author of LEurope des Communistes (with Pascal Delwit), Les Partis Politiques en
Belgique (with Pascal Delwit), LExtreme Droite en France et Belgique (with Pascal
Delwit), and other books.
United States:
9. Ruy Teixeira, Rebuilding a Democratic Majority: Prospects and Strategies for a
Democratic Resurgence
Republican control of the White House for most of the period since 1968, culminating in
George W. Bushs conservative presidency, together with the GOPs capture of both
houses of Congress in 1994, led many political commentators to argue that a durable
Republican realignment had been consolidated. White working-class men, Catholics,
outer suburban and exurban dwellers, and residents of the South and the Interior West
were said to have turned against a Democratic Party that both could no longer effectively
manage the economy and had become too wedded to tax and spend and cultural
liberalism.
In fact, Republican gains began to erode almost immediately after the partys dramatic
1994 successes. After a shaky first two years in office, President Bill Clinton was
decisively reelected in 1996 while his vice president, Al Gore, although defeated in the
Electoral College, actually won the popular vote. Meanwhile, the Democrats picked up
House and Senate seats in the 1996, 1998, and 2000 elections. An improved economy,
Republican overreaching, the captivity of the GOP to its conservative religious and
business wings, and a move by the Democrats back toward the political center
contributed to renewed Democratic strength, especially among working women, Blacks
and Hispanics, and middle class professionals employed in knowledge-intensive cities
and towns -- ideopolises, as we have called them elsewhere.
This shift to the Democrats was masked and partially reversed by the 2001 attack on the
World Trade Center, which allowed the Republicans to gain seats in the 2002 midterm
elections and George Bush to win reelection in 2004 through the skillful playing of the
terror card. But as the war has dragged on and popular opposition has grown, the proDemocratic trend has reemerged, now reinforced by voter anxiety over stagnant wages
and eroded benefitsdue to globalization, technological change, and weakened unions
that has reestablished the Democrats traditional advantage on economic issues. As a
result, the Democrats were finally able to recapture Congress in the 2006 midterm
elections as swing voters turned away from the GOP.
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Unless the situation in Iraq significantly improves, prospects for continued Democratic
gains, including in the 2008 presidential election, appear good, especially if the
Republicans nominate a presidential candidate whose attempts to appeal to the partys
staunchly conservative base are off-putting to more moderate swing voters. But if this
electoral promise is to be realized, the Democrats will have to devise and then implement
successful approaches to the nations pressing economic, social, and foreign policy
problems.
Ruy Teixeira is Senior Fellow at both the Center for American Progress and The
Century Foundation, as well as a Fellow of the New Politics Institute. He has also held
positions at the Economic Policy Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Progressive
Policy Institute. He is the author or co-author of five books including (with John Judis)
The Emerging Democratic Majority (New York: Scribner, 2004), (with Joel Rogers)
Americas Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters (New York:
Basic Books, 2001), and The Disappearing American Voter (Washington, D.C.:
Brookings Institution Press, 1992).
10. James Shoch, Confronting Globalization: the Democratic Partys Shifting Pursuit of
Trade and Competitiveness Policy
With the growing integration of the United States into the global economy in recent
decades, the Democratic Party at various times has advocated a wide range of both trade
and competitiveness policies as it has sought simultaneously to foster economic growth,
defend its core labor constituents, and defeat its Republican adversaries. By the turn of
the new century, however, the Democrats were more narrowly preoccupied with
maintaining fiscal discipline and blocking new trade liberalization initiatives while
retreating from once-promising public investment and other competitiveness proposals.
What accounts for this shift of emphasis? What will the future hold?
James Shoch is Associate Professor of Government at California State University
Sacramento. He is the author of Trading Blows: Party Competition and U.S. Trade
Policy in a Globalizing Era (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina) and articles
on the politics of American trade and industrial policy.
11. Christopher Howard, Restructuring the American Welfare State: Democratic
Dilemmas and Debates.
Often decried as a laggard, the American welfare state is in fact larger, more popular, and
more dynamic than commonly believed, thanks mainly, though not exclusively, to the
efforts of the Democratic Party. Recent years, however, have seen the retrenchment of
certain welfare programs, especially those serving the poor, while other mostly middleclass programs have actually been expanded. What explains these recent trends? What
role has the Democratic Party played in this? How can the Democrats help build a more
just and egalitarian welfare state?

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Christopher Howard is Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary.


He is the author of The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths About U.S.
Social Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and The Hidden Welfare
State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997).
Comparisons, contexts, conclusions:
12. Jane Jenson, Linking needs and constituencies: new policies, old and new voters.
Some needs are manufactured, but stable and long-term needs stem from social positions.
New economic and demographic realities have created needs and constituencies that
liberals and social democrats have only just begun to address. This essay will examine
where efforts have occurred and the results they have achieved. It is premised on the
assumption that shifting family structures and choices and the new risks and needs they
create will be as important for the future of social democracy and the center-left as the
rise of the working-class was for its past.
Jane Jenson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Montreal, where she
holds the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Governance. Her most recent books
are Ltat des citoyennets en Europe et dans les Amriques (Montral : Presses de
lUniversit de Montral, 2007), edited with B. Marqus-Perreira and E. Remacle, La
politique compare : lhistoire, les enjeux, les approaches (Montral : Presses de
lUniversit de Montral, 2003), written with Mamoudou Gazibo; and Who Cares?
Womens Work, Child Care and Welfare State Redesign (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2001) with Mariette Sineau, et al.
13. Sofia Prez, Immigration and the Centre-left in Europe.
If there is a single issue political issue which might derail the center-left in Europe, it is
immigration and the resulting tensions concerning integration, assimilation, citizenship
and access to jobs and social provision. Even as the character of immigration and the
sources from which migrants come to Europe alter, the issue remains salient. Already,
parties of the right have seized the issue and made substantial, if short-lived, electoral
gains. Left-wing parties need to respond to the questions raised by immigration, but they
have difficulty doing so without splitting apart the constituencies they ordinarily seek to
unite. This essay will explore the tensions and challenges surrounding immigration and
assess the likely success of various policies and electoral strategies.
Sofia Prez is Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University. She is the
author of Banking on Privilege: The Politics of Spanish Financial Reform, published by
Cornell University Press in 1997, and is co-author (with Michael Loriaux et al) of Capital
Ungoverned: Liberalizing Finance in Interventionist States, published by Cornell
University Press in 1996. Professor Prez is also the author of scholarly articles, reviews,
papers, book and book chapters on topics ranging from the politics of exchange rate
regimes, monetary policy, wage bargaining, social pacts, and democratic transition. Her
current research centers on the impact of European monetary integration on labor markets
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in countries of the European Union, in particular Italy and Spain and the impact of
immigration on politics.
14. Cronin, Shoch, Ross, Conclusion: Whats left, what possible, whats not.
This final essay will seek to summarize the findings of earlier pieces and also pose
questions for further research and debate. Unlike the introduction, where we mainly look
back and around us, in the conclusion we will look resolutely forward. The aim will be
to identify the likely sources of support for center-left politics, the types of policies that
would be most successful in consolidating that support while addressing social needs, and
the contexts that will increase or decrease the prospects of success in these tasks.
* The titles of particular papers will undoubtedly be changed as the authors get closer to
completing them and as the key themes become clearer.

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