Especially in the post-communist countries, social democrats must rediscover their populist and internationalist roots.

The recent predicament of progressive politics has been best described by Thomas Franks in his book ‘What’s the matter with Kansas?’ (2004): the poor and unprivileged classes seem to vote against their own best interests, and progressive populism has been replaced by conservative populism. This is of course a characteristic not only of Kansas or the United States, but of Europe as well. Hence the importance of ideology.

The manifesto ‘Building the Good Society’ calls for ‘restoring the primacy of politics and rejecting the subordination of political to economic interests’. It also stresses the importance of ‘recognizing and respecting differences of race, religion and culture’. But it does not pay sufficient attention to two issues that – unhappily – are influencing the political atmosphere in Europe today, especially in the post-communist countries. These are the issues of fear and security, and of memory and history. These two factors give sustenance to an angry political outlook that is heavily orientated towards the past and fearful of the future.

Though the memories of Soviet communism have discredited some social democratic ideas in these countries, the confusion of social democracy with communism is relatively easy to disentangle. But there has been a strong tendency towards becoming over-entangled in historical issues, particularly in poring over the lessons of the Second World War, and the relative evils of Stalinism and Nazism, and this feature of recent political discourse needs to be firmly resisted. History should be left to historians. Richard Holbrook’s words to Radko Mladic – ‘No history-lessons, no bull-shit!’ – should be repeated more often.

The politics of memory should be seen as a symptom of the general dearth of attractive visions for the future. Social democrats have not been successful in promoting their alternative vision. Yet history has shown that social democracy can only thrive in a climate of (moderate) optimism. Fear-mongering has never worked well for it. Thus people’s fears need to be addressed or dispelled. As well as economic fears, there are fears of Islam in Western Europe, and of Russia in the east, and of future demographic patterns almost everywhere. Each fear contains a rational kernel – they must not be pushed aside in an attempt at political correctness. But each of these fears is also amenable to being blown out of all proportion.

To be more specific, let me turn to the Estonian example. Since 1991, when Estonia achieved independence from Soviet rule, the Social Democratic Party has never succeeded in gaining a strong foothold. It has been supported only by 6 to 14 per cent of the population, achieving a peak of 16 per cent in 1999. The SDP has served in various neoliberal and national-conservative coalition governments, where it has represented good manners, and putting a human face on radical market-orientated policies. It has always been in danger of being little more than a club for progressive bien-pensant intellectuals, especially during the bubble years, when the economy grew annually by 10 per cent, and every aspirant shop assistant or security guard nourished within themselves dreams of entrepreneurial success. Nothing was less sexy than organised labour. Ideas about social solidarity and the fair distribution of wealth were perceived either as communist relics, or as aims that could be indefinitely postponed until such time as we should have built ‘real capitalism’.

But politics has never been solely determined by economic issues of production and distribution, or by administrative issues of fair procedures and transparent institutions. There are also always the ‘moral issues’ – abortion and homosexuality in Kansas, immigration and multiculturalism in Western Europe, and ethnic issues and issues of memory in Eastern Europe. All of these are based on fear and insecurity. In Estonia the prospect of joining NATO and the EU was for a while able to mitigate people’s fears, and to provide a short-term vision for the future. And the accession process also gave some leverage to pressure from ‘Old Europe’ on countries seeking admission for the liberalisation of their policies towards minorities. But after 2004 that leverage was gone.

In the Estonian context this meant the rise of tensions between the Estonian-speaking and Russian-speaking sections of the population. Before 2004 it seemed that economic prosperity and the safe custody of the EU would be enough to prevent such frictions from exploding. But after 2007 the former communist pragmatists – who had in the meantime turned into neoliberals – began to discover the value of playing the nationalist card. This has proved particularly useful since they have become unable to boast of economic success. The legitimate fears of neighbouring countries about today’s authoritarian and self-assertive Russia have been slyly directed at the Estonian Russian-speaking minority, whose educational, cultural and linguistic needs have been consistently ignored.

(Interestingly, twenty years after the fall of communism there still prevails a strange misconception of Russia as a left-wing country. Nothing is further from the truth. Yet former social-democratic leaders such as Gerhard Schröder and Paavo Lipponen have been responsive to the blandishments of the Russian state-controlled Gazprom, and this, together with the Russian-friendly policies of former German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has done considerable harm to the image of social democracy in Poland and the Baltic states.)

In the current circumstances, the most efficient progressives in Estonia are not the SDP but the Estonian Centre Party (ECP), which belongs to the liberal faction in the European Parliament. Although tainted by corruption charges and an authoritarian management style, as well as a willingness to indulge in vulgar tricks, the ECP has, in an amazing political feat, proved to be the only force in Estonia capable of integrating the ethnic Russians into Estonian politics under a broadly social-democratic agenda. Maybe the relative success of the ECP in the recent local election – where it won a third of the votes – has a broader lesson to teach: that it is possible to be populist and progressive at the same time. If they are to emulate this success, the social democrats, who have tended to be too malleable and too eager to compromise, need to rediscover their populist and internationalist roots. But the international scene does not currently offer favourable conditions for such a strategy.