The Dawn of a New Era: Social Democracy after the Financial Crisis
If Europe’s social democracy wants to meet the challenge of moving into a new era, it needs to become the advocate, the carrier and the implementer of a proper European democracy.10 From the beginning, social democracy was internationalist, treating citizens as the sovereign, while conservatives thought of them as cattle.11 Today, European social democracy must fight for individuals’ freedom to take political decisions at the European level. They must acknowledge that European citizens are equal citizens with equal rights to decide what they consider their best interests. European democracy means, European citizens will be able to elect a European government that will make laws that are applicable to all citizens because they are all affected by them. This is the opposite of the conservative approach to policy-making, which was recently articulated by the French president suggesting that France should assume the presidency of the European Union for a number of years. By contrast, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) has made an important step in the right direction when it adopted the Grundsatzprogramm in Hamburg in 2007, which states: ‘Our model is a political union granting all European citizens democratic rights of participation. The democratic Europe needs a government answerable to parliament on the foundation of a European constitution.’12
The SPD clearly understood that there will be no Social Europe without a proper European democracy. It is now necessary that all democratic parties in Europe unite behind this project. A new era of human fulfilment, social justice and democratic progress is within reach, if social democrats in Europe draw the conclusions from the failures of the previous economic and political paradigm. But it is also clear that this redefinition of aims and purposes is necessarily a European venture. Europe remains the most exciting project of our times.
- For detailed analysis and proposals see Collignon, Stefan, Christian Paul (2008), Pour la République européenne, Odile Jacob, Paris. [↩]
- Charles de Gaule famously once said: ‘Les français sont des veaux.’ But quod licet bovi, non licet jovi: A conservative, authoritarian politician may think that way, a political philosophy that claims the equality of men cannot be. [↩]
- http://www.parteitag.spd.de/servlet/PB/show/1734195/Hamburger%20Programm%20engl.pdf [↩]
