Social democracy and the 'Europe question': Lessons from Weimar?

Confronted by the catastrophe of the First World War and the fractured Europe of the 1920s, German social democrats attempted to rethink the relationship between economic integration and international cooperation. They arrived at a complex synthesis between European federation, protectionism and free trade.

On 24 July 2018, Jeremy Corbyn gave a landmark speech in Birmingham, in which he outlined the core principles behind the Labour Party's campaign for a new UK industrial strategy. (1) Under the slogan 'Build it in Britain', he condemned the political economy of the UK of the last four decades as 'magical thinking', arguing that a future Labour government must be committed to more proactive state investment and intervention in the economy. His particular target was the loss of UK manufacturing to a mixture of outsourcing and service-sector specialisation: 'We've been told that it's good, even advanced, for our country to manufacture less and less and to rely instead on cheap labour abroad to produce imports while we focus on the City of London and the financial sector.' For Corbyn, this represents not only a neglect of the UK's historical role as a world-leading source of high-quality manufactured goods, but also a significant loss of political and economic independence.

The question of achieving 'greater control of the economy' is, Corbyn argues, integrally related to the UK's future relationship with the European Union. While existing EU rules allow for significant economic intervention, Labour must 'seek exemptions or clarifications from EU state aid and procurement rules where necessary as part of the Brexit negotiations to take further steps to support cutting edge industries and local businesses'. This, Corbyn insists, is not intended as a hostile act, a prelude to a Donald Trump-style trade war: 'Wanting to build it in Britain is not turning away from the world, nor some return to protectionism'. Rather, it is a signal that a Labour-led UK would use its reclaimed political sovereignty to adjust--but not wholly overturn--the terms of its relationship with the EU.

Corbyn's speech and its mixed reception both within and outside Labour circles fed into wider debates on the left about how closely the UK should be integrated with Europe after Brexit. At the heart of these debates lies a tension about the optimal way to defend the best interests of socialists and workers in taking a position on Europe. On the one hand, socialists are instinctive internationalists, who prioritise class solidarity over illusory-reactionary national loyalties. On the other hand, they are also conscious of operating in a world where the prevailing and most powerful international institutions are historically shaped and currently dominated by ideologies hostile to socialism. Socialists (including Labour) have historically seen Europe and the EU as a way to keep in check petty nationalism, but deplored the way that 'Europeanism' has come to be defined in opposition to the worst-off in the rest of the world. They have seen in European institutions safeguards for domestic, civic, human and labour rights that would otherwise be subordinated to the vagaries of partisan government, but found it difficult to completely trust the EU as a force for social justice, given the disastrous management of the Eurozone by member states and the European Central Bank.

The context of Brexit has thrown these debates into particularly acute relief in the UK today. But the modern British left is not alone in its ambivalence concerning the proper relationship between socialism and Europeanism. It is always worth consulting historical precedent when faced with thorny social questions and dilemmas of policy or strategy. The wealth of deep and complex past socialist thinking on the European question offers a treasure trove of ideas to illuminate anew current Labour debates on the future relationship between the UK and the EU.

This article focuses on just one such debate, harking back to one of the first moments when socialists began to consider the prospect of European unification in a sustained and serious way: during and after the First World War. Of course, the institutions that became what is now the EU had not yet emerged at this point. Nevertheless, the debate offers a valuable insight into how socialists who believed in the need for 'more Europe' (in whatever sense) hoped and planned to bring this about. Given that the EU as it emerged historically did so very much under the auspices of Christian democracy, with auxiliary contributions by social democracy and liberalism, this can be seen in part as a 'road not taken'. What makes this debate stand out in the present context is that it was characterised above all by discussions over the integration of economic relations between European countries, especially questions of the relative merits of free trade and protectionism. These are certainly highly pertinent to the issues raised by Corbyn's speech, and it is through awareness of these and other similar moments in socialist history that the Labour Party will best be able to overcome its current impasse.

The debate was conducted between a group of socialists and social democrats centred on the journal Sozialistische Monatshefte, one of the premier left-oriented publications of early twentieth-century Europe. Its largely German participants engaged intensively with fellow socialists and socially-minded liberals across Europe, above all in Austria, Russia and the UK--including with such luminaries as John Maynard Keynes, John Hobson and Bertrand Russell, as well as major Labour Party figures like Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee. Moreover, the debate was characterised by a strikingly internationalist outlook, and its protagonists reveal a very careful and knowledgeable consideration of intra-European relations, especially the relationship between Europe and the UK. Although the Monatshefte often disparaged the doe-eyed Anglophilia of many German liberals and socialists, they retained a studious (albeit critical) attentiveness to British geopolitical interests, economic conditions and social-policy developments. While too much has changed in the underlying structure of global political economy for this debate to act as a source of direct policy recommendations for Britain, it nonetheless invites contemporary socialists to return to first principles. Unencumbered by the burdens imposed by the history of...