Though social democracy has had its problems, it offers a politics that can be developed and broadened to encompass the needs of the present.

Social democracy faces testing times in Europe and elsewhere, but the pessimism can be overdone. We should avoid both the politics of nostalgia and the politics of despair. An example of the politics of despair is the view that nothing at all was achieved in the Third Way period, which is often seen in entirely negative terms as a wasted decade, during which social democracy succumbed to neoliberalism and became indistinguishable from it. This then feeds the politics of nostalgia, the idea that there was a golden age of social democracy located somewhere in the period between 1945 and 1970. This exaggerates the success of neoliberalism in the last thirty years, just as it overestimates the achievements of post-war social democracy. The post-war years were hardly an era of social-democratic party hegemony in Europe. Indeed in the 1950s there was virtually a social-democracy-free zone as far as Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain were concerned. Neoliberalism has been a powerful ideology, but even overtly neoliberal governments in the 1980s were unable to roll back the state in the way they hoped, or to unwind the coils of social democracy. As Steven Hill in his contribution to this debate reminds us, viewed from anywhere else on the planet, Europe (including Britain) still looks like an oasis of social democratic achievement.

But Jon Cruddas and Andrea Nahles are right to argue that that we have entered a new period, with some major new challenges, and social democracy has to adjust. We do need some serious reflection on what we mean by social democracy, and what its priorities should now be. Irving Kristol once called neo-conservatism a persuasion, not a fixed doctrine, and that is how we should think of social democracy. It is a particular approach to politics, one built around ideas like security, co-operation and fairness, but whose ideas have to be adapted in every new era of world politics. We need to re-examine the common principles which define social democracy as a persuasion, and how best they should be applied to the problems we face. They help make sense of the world around us, as well as indicating what we should do. The social-democratic persuasion has to be renewed in every generation and every period, and this time is no different, but we should not imagine we live in some new dark age for the left. There have been much darker times in the last century. Let us celebrate the achievements of social democracy at the same time as we analyse its shortcomings.

It is true that there has been a narrowing of social democracy in recent times. Let us now seek to broaden it again, drawing on its rich inheritance of ideas, institutions, experiences and policies. Social democracy will be stronger in the future if it engages with other traditions such as republicanism – rediscovering new ways to define the public realm and the public interest – and cosmopolitanism, recovering the internationalism which one hundred years ago was its hallmark. Social democracy in the past has often had a fairly simple-minded view of politics; yoking progressive ideas with popular majorities, and using state power to bring about the good society. This sets up expectations which cannot be met and leads to swings between unrealistic hope and unfounded disillusion. What we need instead is a political vision which acknowledges the intractable dilemmas that make up politics, the irreconcilable nature of many of our deepest desires, the complexity of the problems we face. Our aim should not be to achieve political power in order to run everything, but to enable the kind of institutions to flourish which will embed the values of security, co-operation and fairness. As many contributors to this debate have urged, a concern with the winning of elections and the gaining of state power remains important, but should not lead to the neglect of efforts to shape the wider context, both national and international, in which governments operate. It is the ability to do that in the past that has been the greatest achievement of social democracy, and it is that above all we should seek to renew.