The primacy of politics: social democracy and the making of Europe's twentieth century.
| Author | Taylor, Robert |
| Position | Book review |
Sheri Berman
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2007
Social democracy was the most successful and civilised political project during the twentieth century in Europe. Its finest models were to be found in Scandinavia, especially in Sweden after 1932. Their subtle, measured blend of liberty, solidarity and equality with the workings of open market economies created the most prosperous, secure and egalitarian societies for the many and not just the few ever achieved in human history. They still thrive in the new age of globalisation.
It is true that European social democracy could often seem like little more than an over-cautious, timid, cumulative process of gradual steps, rooted in mundane pragmatism. For enemies on its left, social democracy meant at best little more than an unacceptable accommodation with capitalism and a betrayal of socialist values. But other critics also believed it hardly strayed beyond what Karl Popper once described as 'piecemeal social engineering'. Young idealists were more intoxicated by Communism and Trotskyism or anarcho-syndicalism. Charismatic revolutionary figures like Rosa Luxembourg, Leon Trotsky, Che Guevara, even Ho Chi Minh stirred their emotions. Perhaps Willi Brandt and Olaf Palme were among the few social democrats who articulated an attractive, humanistic ideology for a better world, to be achieved not through the need to resort to the use of violence but by democratic, parliamentary means of consent and legitimacy.
Sheri Berman, an associate professor at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York, has written an insightful and stimulating volume that inter-relates the ideas of European social democracy as they evolved from the anti-Marxist revisionism of the German Eduard Bernstein before the First World War through the neglected Swedish contributions of Hjalmar Branting and Per Albin Hansson to the present day. Although a political scientist, she has produced a masterly volume of modern European history.
Our contemporary academic world of comparative politics has been over-impressed by recent analysis of 'the varieties of capitalism', which has completely ignored the salience of history as the important explanation for the diverse ways in which European democratic societies have responded to the external pressures of globalisation and technological change. Berman's strength lies in her recognition that the successes and failures of social democracy in twentieth-century Europe cannot be understood...
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