Utopianism is a necessary part of our rethinking of social democracy.

Almost exactly twenty years ago the Berlin wall came crashing down on ‘actually existing socialism’ in Eastern Europe. Some commentators on the political right were quick to announce the ‘end of history’ and the ever-lasting triumph of the liberal-capitalist order: the end of the cold war did not only discredit communism; it also tarnished its sibling and arch-rival social democracy. Were not both major ideologies on the left born out of the pre-first-world-war socialist movements in Europe? Did they not both share a belief in the perfectability of man/woman? Were they not both committed to diverse projects of social engineering? Was not an underlying anti-capitalism on the part of many social democrats the reason for not a few among them coming to regard ‘actually existing socialism’ with rose-tinted spectacles during times of détente in Europe? Were not both upholding the utopia of ‘a good society’, although they had different ideas about how to achieve it?

In the early 1990s utopia was as dead as communism, and social democracy was in deep crisis. In many countries in Europe it underwent an often painful transition process, involving changes in leadership and changes in programmatic orientation. The latter usually included a partial endorsement of the liberal market economics that had seemed so successful in sweeping everything before it in the neo-conservative era of the 1980s. It also involved high doses of pragmatism: social democracy was redefined as that which worked.

This mixture of liberal economics and programmatic vacuousness became all the more widespread as increasing numbers of opinion-poll experts were telling the social democratic parties that they had lost their traditional milieu, and were now dealing with a flexible electorate that would vote on specific issues rather than according to party loyalty.

The shock troops of the new model social democracy came from Britain. New Labour stood precisely for the shedding of ideological baggage (clause 4), the endorsement of markets (flexible labour markets; virtually uncontrolled financial markets), and a peculiar combination of policies aimed at social justice and those emphasising individual responsibility (e.g. welfare to work, or, in higher education, the coupling of a commitment to student fees with the aim of substantially raising the number of students coming from disadvantaged social groups). The idea of private-public partnerships epitomised the desire to retain ideas of the common good, but under new, less statist and more market-oriented frameworks.

New Labour’s thinking was clearly influenced by the rethinking of the Democratic Party in the USA, which had seen the rise of Bill Clinton to power. It also had its parallels elsewhere in Europe, in particular in the Dutch Labour Party’s ideological reorientation, which in many respects preceded that of the British Labour Party.

However, New Labour’s ideas did not prove popular everywhere. The Blair-Schröder paper of ten years ago did not so much as raise an eyebrow in Britain, but it caused a storm in a teacup in Germany, with very high levels of dissatisfaction within the SPD at Schröder’s attempt to give the party an ideological make-over. And the socialists in France were always willing to pour scorn on attempts in Britain and elsewhere to ‘modernise’ social democracy.

During the second half of the 1990s it seemed as if this ‘modernisation’ had the potential of being electorally successful. But now, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the discourse of ‘crisis’ has returned to social democracy, and the response to ‘crisis’ is – wait for it – utopia: the revival of ideas about ‘the good society’.

Jon Cruddas and Andrea Nahles have produced a paper which seeks to abandon the ‘modernisation’ of social democracy. They return to some of the more traditional commitments of social-democratic parties, such as to regulation of labour and financial markets, strong trade unions, the harmonisation of tax policies across the EU, and the fight against poverty and social exclusion. They even mention the dreaded word ‘redistribution’, which had been virtually excluded from the dictionaries of modernising social democrats. They add to this a commitment to sustainability, transparency and democracy, which not only speaks to the green agenda, but also seeks to learn lessons from the long-term failure of the left to prioritise politics over economics.

In those countries where the 1990s and 2000s saw the emergence of major parties to the left of social democracy, the ‘good society’ paper will be seen as a blueprint for electoral alliances on the left; in other countries it will simply be seen as a rallying call for the intellectual renewal of social-democratic parties that are seen as having reached a programmatic cul-de-sac.

But let us be clear about the basis of this vision: it is based on nothing less than the reigning in of global capitalism, through a global, or at the very least European, social-democratic response. And in this it remains as utopian at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it was in the last third of the nineteenth century, when social-democratic parties first emerged in Europe. Even more so now than then, one could argue, because then, for good reasons, social democracy tied its flags to the nation state, where it was to win its major successes in the twentieth century. But today it has to leave behind the national framework which served it so well in the past.

Utopias were necessary in the nineteenth century – for thinking outside the box, thinking about alternatives to a system of untrammelled greed. And who could deny that the contemporary world is also in dire need of utopias, to enable us to think about alternatives to a system that is about to condemn humankind to oblivion. In that sense one can only wish ‘the good society’ success in generating more utopian thinking.