Europe and The Left Resisting The Populist Tide James L Newell Full Chapter
Europe and The Left Resisting The Populist Tide James L Newell Full Chapter
Europe and The Left Resisting The Populist Tide James L Newell Full Chapter
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Preface
The idea for this book came to me while I was employed as a ‘visiting
scientist’ at the University of Turin between February and May 2019.
As a UK and EU citizen whose political sympathies are firmly on the
left and who is also strongly opposed to Brexit, I wanted to explore the
links between progressive politics and European integration. The Euro-
pean Parliament elections were due to be held in May, and colleagues
in the University’s Department of Culture, Politics and Society were
gearing up to study the campaigns of the parties and the behaviour of
voters. Media commentary was dominated by the suggestion that the
nationalist, populist right would make significant advances at the elec-
tions and that Europe itself would figure more highly than in the past in
the various national contests. I therefore decided to produce this volume
whose purpose is to explore what the European elections have to tell
us about what the mainstream left in Europe is doing to pursue a left-
wing integration agenda as a means of countering the growth of right-
wing populism. It has been made possible thanks to the timely submis-
sions of the volume’s contributors and to the staff at Palgrave, especially
Ambra Finotello, Anne-Kathrin Birchley-Brun and Arun Kumar. Thanks
are also due to Giuliano Bobba and Antonella Seddone for making avail-
able most of the data on which the country chapters are based and
to Franca Roncarolo and Luigi Ceccarini. They persuaded the Univer-
sity of Turin and the University of Urbino to have me as a visitor in
2019 and therefore helped to mobilise the resources in terms of time
v
vi PREFACE
and money without which this volume would not have been possible.
Finally, participants in the June 2019 conference, ‘The Crisis of Euro-
pean Social Democracy: Causes and Consequences in an Age of Political
Uncertainty’ held at the University of Genoa, gave me important insights.
They would not have been able to do this had it not been for the hard
work of Mara Morini, Antonella Seddone and Davide Vampa in organ-
ising the conference, which was sponsored by the UK Political Studies
Association’s Italian Politics Specialist Group and the Aston Centre for
Europe.
1 Introduction 1
James L. Newell
vii
viii CONTENTS
12 Conclusion 253
James L. Newell
Index 265
Notes on Contributors
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xiii
xiv ABBREVIATIONS
xvii
xviii LIST OF FIGURES
xxiii
xxiv LIST OF TABLES
Introduction
James L. Newell
J. L. Newell (B)
Manchester, UK
that is shared by other writers (among which one may include Hilary
Wainwright (2018), Ania Skrzypek (2013), and Cäcilie Schildberg et al.
(2014)) and organisations (including the think tanks, Friedrich Ebert
Stiftung, the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, Social Europe
and others). In the UK, it is a perspective exemplified by the grass-
roots organisation, ‘Another Europe is Possible’. Formed in February
2016 ‘to campaign for a Remain position in the EU referendum from
a specifically left, progressive perspective’, it now campaigns for the UK’s
re-entry into the EU, which it sees as requiring ‘radical and far-reaching
reform, breaking with austerity economics and pioneering a radically new
development strategy’.2
The suggestion that, for the left, the way back to electoral health lies
in a project for European integration and democratisation strikes me as
a persuasive one for several reasons. First, it provides an answer to the
fundamental question, ‘If (thanks to the collapse of the Berlin Wall)
communism appears to be fatally wounded, and if (thanks to globali-
sation) social democracy is in crisis, then what does it mean to be on
the left in the early twenty-first century?’ The question is a fundamental
one because you cannot achieve anything unless you first have a clear
idea of what it is you want to achieve. There are several aspects to the
answer. First, recognition that national communities can only assert regu-
lation of the processes of globalisation by pooling national sovereignty
speaks to the traditional internationalist, cosmopolitan agendas of the
European socialist parties since their founding in the nineteenth/early
twentieth centuries. Ever since Marx and Engels elaborated their theories,
internationalism, or international solidarity, has been a defining feature
of what it means to be on the left. In an early statement of the thesis
of economic globalisation, the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party
argued that ‘[m]odern industry [had] established the world market, for
which the discovery of America paved the way’; for ‘[t]he need of a
constantly expanding market for its products [had chased] the bour-
geoisie over the entire surface of the globe’, so that ‘[i]n place of the
old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we [had] intercourse
in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations’. Consequently,
the revolutionary abolition of private property would not be possible in
2 https://www.anothereurope.org/about/.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
one country alone. For, as Engels put it—in ‘The Principles of Commu-
nism’ written a few months prior to publication of the Manifesto—‘big
industry [had] already brought all the peoples of the Earth … into such
close relation with one another that none [was] independent of what
happen[ed] to the others’.3 It seemed to follow from this that efforts to
bring about the workers’ emancipation would have to be organised inter-
nationally and that workers’ parties would have to oppose wars between
capitalist states. Such wars, in the words of the resolution adopted at the
seventh International Socialist Congress in 1907, were ‘favoured by the
national prejudices … systematically cultivated … in the interest of the
ruling classes for the purpose of distracting the proletarian masses from
their own class tasks as well as from their duties of international solidar-
ity’.4 Famously, the Second International disintegrated as its constituent
parties found it impossible to maintain a united front against the outbreak
of World War I. However, the tradition of international solidarity lingers
on in the opposition of parties of the left—as a general rule—to racism
and xenophobia, and—again, as a general rule—in their positive attitudes
to cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism.
Second, if to be on the left means to embrace the principle of equality
(Bobbio 1994), then the left-wing project is a project of empowerment
and therefore democratisation. Working-class movements of the early
nineteenth century, such as the Chartists, were movements that sought
to extend to workers the franchise that had been won by manufacturers,
as well as guarantees on equality before the law, freedom of speech and
freedom of assembly, the absence of which had until then hampered the
development of their organisations. In this sense, a project for a fully
integrated, democratic Europe is merely a twenty-first-century example—
an extension to the international plane—of demands parties of the left
have always made. As is frequently argued on the left, the shortcomings
in terms of accountability in EU policy-making provide inroads for the
undue influence of multinational corporations and the powerful such that
it is inevitably driven by big business and its interests against those of ordi-
nary people. Indeed, it was precisely this argument that lay at the heart of
3 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf.
4 https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1907/militarism.
htm.
6 J. L. NEWELL
the support a minority on the left lent to the Leave side in the UK Brexit
referendum, their suggestion being that
While there have been idealists involved and progressive laws made along
the way, at its core [the EU] is undemocratic and distant, a threat to all
those living in its shadow. However sweet the propaganda, it is a tool for
multinationals, another part of the globalisation process. (King 2015)
While (for a whole host of reasons there is not the space to go into here)
left-wing Eurosceptics tend to see a democratic EU as unrealisable, we
should perhaps avoid confusing ‘difficult’ with ‘impossible’. No doubt
many sympathisers of the Chartists saw their suffrage demands as unrealis-
able. In 1839, their petition, though three miles long and with 1,280,000
signatures, was rejected out of hand by parliament by 235 votes to 46.
However, by the middle of the next century their demands were normal
and accepted parts of the political architecture of democratic countries
everywhere.
Third, ‘critical Europeanism’ represents a natural extension of the
traditional social-democratic project. That is, if social democracy is the
promise to extend principles of equality from the political to the economic
and social spheres, then it is a project for the extension of rights. This
is, ultimately, what political conflict is all about, its outcomes being to
shift the patterns of rights and obligations recognised in societies.5 And
since patterns of rights and obligations, once shifted, tend to be long
lasting (as they become part of a new normal, taken-for-granted, state of
affairs), so political struggle, including struggle over (in)equality is, ulti-
mately, a struggle for hegemony. As countries have competed for inward
investment, what might be called the ‘social-democratic hegemony’ of the
initial post-war years has been rolled back. Spearheaded initially by the
advent of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the West, neoliberal
globalisation has since eroded or threatened large numbers of the rights
previously fought for and won by social democrats, especially in the field
5 Conflicts over rights, in turn, are conducted by reference to the principle of justice:
to treat the same things in the same way and different things differently. For example, the
arguments leading up to passage of the Cirinnà law in Italy in 2016, giving LGBT+ people
some of the partnership rights already enjoyed by heterosexual couples (Ozzano 2020),
revolved around the question of whether sexuality was a relevant criterion of difference
in the conferral of partnership rights. For the Catholic Church it was; for the LGBT+
community it was not.
1 INTRODUCTION 7
6 Actually, racism and xenophobia have not emerged in recent years thanks to migrant
crises and the rise of right-wing populism but predated them, being bound up with nation
states and the controls on population movements they exert by means of the passport
system. As Lavenex (2018: 1) points out, ‘[I]t is only because the world is organized into
sovereign states that international migration becomes an issue that needs to be governed’.
8 J. L. NEWELL
which at 51% was the highest for twenty years. As signs of encourage-
ment for a left-wing integration project, these were all small—but they
were signs nonetheless. The combined health and economic crisis created
by the coronavirus outbreak eight months later suggested that without
such a project, or something similar, the EU might lose its already fragile
legitimacy, thus putting its very survival at risk.
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Bobbio, N. (1994). Destra e Sinistra: Ragioni e significati di una distinzione
politica. Roma: Donzelli editore.
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1 INTRODUCTION 15
The Challenges
CHAPTER 2
M. Holmes (B)
European School of Politics (ESPOL), Lille, France
e-mail: michael.holmes@univ-catholille.fr
K. Roder
Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK
However, in the 1970s that model began to stall, and a new neoliberal
consensus emerged as the dominant paradigm. In this period, capitalism
transformed social democracy, and the EU played a role in that. The
Union was strongly influenced by neoliberal ideas in key policy areas.
This had a profound effect on social democracy, with Lavelle arguing,
‘social democrats have embraced neo-liberal policies since at least the
1980s’ (2008: 9). Finally, we argue that the dominance of this neolib-
eral consensus was fractured by the financial crisis of 2008. But instead
of revitalising social democracy, the crisis seems to have accelerated its
decline.
These developments have shaped the Eurosceptic dimension of social
democracy. On the one hand, social democrats have always espoused
an internationalist vision and have for the most part accepted working
within a capitalist framework. Crouch described social democracy as a
way of ‘making capitalism fit for society’ (2013), which sought ‘to recon-
cile socialist ideas with democratic politics in a capitalist world’ (Keman
2017: 3) and which ‘traditionally insisted on the need to use democracy
to address capitalism’s negative consequences’ (Berman 2020). On the
other hand, some social democrats have regarded European integration
as a limiting factor—be that real or potential—in achieving their preferred
policy goals.
This chapter discusses four periods in the relationship between social
democracy and European integration. There was a hesitant period in the
1950s and 1960s, where some major social democratic parties were uncer-
tain about the benefits of integration and where Eurosceptic opinions
were quite prevalent. This gave way to a period of social democratic
support for integration in the 1970s and 1980s, with Euroscepticism
becoming marginalised. As neoliberalism took hold in the 1990s and
2000s, Eurosceptic opinions began to re-emerge, though the dominant
social democratic stance remained pro-European. Finally, the period from
the financial crisis in 2008 has seen further strengthening of social demo-
cratic Euroscepticism, though still within a context of pro-Europeanism.
We identify two main sources of social democratic Euroscepticism.
First, there is an ideological dimension. While social democracy has always
accommodated itself to capitalism, the degree of that accommodation
varies. Some have accepted a tight embrace; others have sought a more
arms-length relationship. This is reflected in perspectives on European
integration. Second, there is a national dimension. This produces different
social democracies that are specific to their national political and economic
22 M. HOLMES AND K. RODER
1 In the Willem Drees governments in the Netherlands from 1948 to 1958, the PvdA
held areas such as Finance, Social Affairs, Reconstruction and Housing, and Agriculture
(which included food supplies). In Italy, the PSDI featured in a number of coalitions in
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