Social democrats must find a new common language, and learn how to work with new social constituencies.

Any serious discussion of the future of social democracy needs to assess the recent historical fortunes of social-democratic parties in government across Europe as a whole, as well as the enduring credibility of its key ideas. What can we learn from past failures, including the recent defeat of the left in many European elections? And which social-democratic ideas can ‘live’ in new contexts?

One problem is that we have very different social-democratic traditions in Europe. The British Fabian model of a centralised state, dependent upon large-scale redistribution, planning and a ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state, was always quite a different species to the Scandinavian model, which was more transparent, durable and efficient, and more responsive to difference, though still dependent on high taxation. And what of the countries which do not have a strong social-democratic tradition? Italy, for example, has little social-democratic culture, and the left has been undergoing a serious crisis of identity

John Gray argued in a Demos pamphlet After Social Democracy, published in 1996 (that is, at the beginning of the last ‘dawn’ of the European centre left), that the social-democratic tradition had been made redundant by the combined impact of globalisation, the historical and irreversible decline of the labour movement and the impossibility of achieving universal egalitarian goals. His alternative solution, what he called ‘communitarian liberalism’, was a hybrid doctrine able to accommodate in a pluralistic and less ideologically conditioned way the varied demands of freedom and fairness advocated by the centre left.

Certainly, this has always struck me as a more coherent analysis than the ‘third way’, as advocated by Anthony Giddens, which never convinced in its replacement of ‘equality’ by ‘inclusion’, or its marriage of market efficiency and social justice. We don’t have to go all the way with Gray to accept that he correctly identified one of the key dilemmas, which some contributors have already alluded to in this debate: how to develop forms of common life and public spaces where the market has no place, but which do not rest upon unrealisable notions of state-delivered equality?

A starting-point would be to agree on some shared ideas and language. In place of the state as a ‘caretaker’, social democrats will have to redefine the centrality of the ‘public’. This means challenging the increasingly widespread and pernicious doctrine of managerialism and its neoliberal rationale. If ‘equality of outcome’ – always a problematic concept for the left – is unattainable, then how about an application of R.H. Tawney’s concept of ‘equal worth’ in the era of widening global inequality? And sustainability will need to be as central to the modern left of the future as ‘tax and spend’ was to the social democrats in the early post-war period.

Secondly, the European left needs to galvanise new social constituencies. If the international labour movement cannot perform the central role it has had in the past, then the new civic forces which have grown – to challenge mafia and corruption, defend the environment and resist racism – must now be central in the projects of the left. Here we can learn from the extraordinary failure of the Italian centre-left parties to seriously engage with the many civil society groups and movements in opposition to Silvio Berlusconi. If any serious environmental strategy is to be forthcoming, overcoming the suspicions of rural communities towards the ‘urban’ left will be crucial, when we consider that small producers and farmers will be as central to this project as consumer protests. One of the main failings of social democracy in the past has been the chauvinism, inertia and insularity of many of its parties. While they will never rediscover their mass bases, they now need to demonstrate that they can be more than cartels for careerist politicians.