Project Proposal Left-right

7/24/2019 Project Proposal Left-right

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

Globalized World

Editors and organizers-

James 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.


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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.


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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


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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 non-

manual. 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


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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 white-

collar 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 long-

term 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


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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 life-

long 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


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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


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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


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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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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.3See 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.

4See, 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 structuralconstraints 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 andtransformed 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-Marxistvision of socialism. Revealing social democracys true ideological and political contourscan 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 oncritical contemporary debates such as those over politics in an age of globalization and

the future of the left in advanced industrial democracies.

Sheri Bermanis associate professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia

University, in New York City. She has written The Social Democratic Moment: Ideasand 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 Europeanmodel 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 anduncertain social democratic movement do with this truth?

George Ross is Hillquit Professor in Labor and Social Thought and Director of the Centerfor European Studies at Brandeis University, USA, Senior Faculty Associate of theMinda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, USA, and

Professeur Associ of the Chaire Jean Monnet and Department of Political Science of theUniversity of Montreal, Canada. He is the author ofJacques Delors and European

Integration(London: Polity, 1995), and editor, with Andrew Martin, of The Brave NewWorld of European Unions (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 1999) andEuros 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 themobilization 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 Pontussonis Professor of Political Science at Princeton University. He haswritten, 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 socialand electoral base. Workers are declining, the new middle classes are stressed, the

gauche caviare is fickle, while gauchisme and populism are constant threats to socialdemocratic 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, FreeUniversity of Brussels. He is the author ofIn 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 ofthe 21st century. Defeat has brought in its train dissent, discord and proposals for

reshaping the appeal and programme that have guided French socialism in recentdecades. 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, isFrench socialism or social democracy condemned to being a backward-looking force,

defending what is under threat but incapable of crafting policies for the future? GeorgeRoss 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 verydirectly 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 Center-Left in such turbulent circumstances. In the 1940s and 1950s the socialists had been

marginalized ideologically and electorally by its Cold War centrist pro-Americanism. Inthe 1960s, its leadership was taken over by Francois Mitterrand following a prescient

insight that electoral and programmatic alliances with the Communists would ultimatelyfavor 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, andplanning more appropriate to 1945 than to the 1980s. Enacting this program, when

governments across Europe and in the United States were shifting to anti-inflationarypolicies, 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 toengineer 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 theirchanged policies, however, the Socialists retained their fundamental strategy. The

results, over time, were a slow decline of voting support and the disaffection of loyalistsof 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 theEuropean Union so as to include former Communist countries. A third was an intenseanxiety 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 leftbefore 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. In2007, 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 hercampaign positions were simultaneously too Left-conservative and too unclear. French

social democracy, this essay will argue, is a living laboratory for observing theconsequences of the constraints and dilemmas addressed in this book.

George Rosshas studied the French left for many years and written extensively on itsproblems 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 Goldhammeris 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 EuropeanStudies 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 ofCulture. 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 TranslationPrize, 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 thewritings 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 onFrench 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 Labourfelt 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 neverthelessworked 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 hasbeen 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 twoquestions: first, have New Labours efforts to modernise social democracy constituted auseful 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 issuesor a capitulation to a more traditional, conservative approach?

James Croninis Professor of History at Boston College. He is an associate of theCenter for European Studies at Harvard University and is presently Visiting Fellow at the

Centre for Contemporary British History, Institute of Historical Research, at theUniversity 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 Worldthe 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 newsocial 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 periodof 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 worldeconomy 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 deprivationimposed 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-lefthave 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 Waeleis Chair of the Political Science Department and Associate of the

Institute for European Studies at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. He is theauthor of LEurope des Communistes (with Pascal Delwit), Les Partis Politiques en

Belgique (with Pascal Delwit), LExtreme Droite en France et Belgique (with PascalDelwit), 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 inGeorge W. Bushs conservative presidency, together with the GOPs capture of both

houses of Congress in 1994, led many political commentators to argue that a durableRepublican realignment had been consolidated. White working-class men, Catholics,

outer suburban and exurban dwellers, and residents of the South and the Interior Westwere 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 culturalliberalism.

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 wasdecisively reelected in 1996 while his vice president, Al Gore, although defeated in theElectoral 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 centercontributed to renewed Democratic strength, especially among working women, Blacks

and Hispanics, and middle class professionals employed in knowledge-intensive citiesand 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 midtermelections 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 pro-Democratic trend has reemerged, now reinforced by voter anxiety over stagnant wages

and eroded benefitsdue to globalization, technological change, and weakened unionsthat has reestablished the Democrats traditional advantage on economic issues. As a

result, the Democrats were finally able to recapture Congress in the 2006 midtermelections 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 theRepublicans 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 implementsuccessful approaches to the nations pressing economic, social, and foreign policyproblems.

Ruy Teixeirais 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 heldpositions 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 ofTrade 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 tradeand competitiveness policies as it has sought simultaneously to foster economic growth,

defend its core labor constituents, and defeat its Republican adversaries. By the turn ofthe new century, however, the Democrats were more narrowly preoccupied with

maintaining fiscal discipline and blocking new trade liberalization initiatives whileretreating from once-promising public investment and other competitiveness proposals.

What accounts for this shift of emphasis? What will the future hold?

James Shochis Associate Professor of Government at California State UniversitySacramento. 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 articleson 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, andmore dynamic than commonly believed, thanks mainly, though not exclusively, to the

efforts of the Democratic Party. Recent years, however, have seen the retrenchment ofcertain welfare programs, especially those serving the poor, while other mostly middle-

class programs have actually been expanded. What explains these recent trends? Whatrole 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 Howardis 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 WelfareState: 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 examinewhere 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 theycreate 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 Jensonis Professor of Political Science at the University of Montreal, where sheholds the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Governance. Her most recent books

areLtat des citoyennets en Europe et dans les Amriques(Montral : Presses delUniversit de Montral, 2007), edited with B. Marqus-Perreira and E. Remacle,La

politique compare : lhistoire, les enjeux, les approaches(Montral : Presses delUniversit de Montral, 2003), written with Mamoudou Gazibo; and Who Cares?

Womens Work, Child Care and Welfare State Redesign(Toronto: University of TorontoPress, 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, citizenshipand 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 theyhave difficulty doing so without splitting apart the constituencies they ordinarily seek to

unite. This essay will explore the tensions and challenges surrounding immigration andassess the likely success of various policies and electoral strategies.

Sofia Prez is Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University. She is theauthor ofBanking on Privilege: The Politics of Spanish Financial Reform, published byCornell University Press in 1997, and is co-author (with Michael Loriaux et al) of Capital

Ungoverned: Liberalizing Finance in Interventionist States, published by CornellUniversity 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. Hercurrent 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 ofimmigration 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 lookback 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 thatwould 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 tocompleting them and as the key themes become clearer.

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