The defining task facing the modernising left in Europe is to craft a new social contract for the first half of the 21st century. The progressive left must speak of a new vision underpinned by its own original and distinctive model of global political economy. A contract for the future in a changing world should be animated by the ideal of guaranteeing opportunity and security for all, not just a few. A new constellation of ideas is required to infuse politics on the left. We must be parties that understand the future, from science and advanced technology to work patterns and new global threats, if we are to claim the coming century as our own.
Progressive politics will be shaped by five overarching themes that promise to redefine industrialised societies in the decade to come. Our purpose here is to anticipate developments in the economy and society rather than waiting to react as change sweeps over us.
First, the postwar social democratic model as the guarantor of high employment and decent public provision is, in parts of Europe, at risk of imminent collapse, as existing employment-based social insurance systems become less sustainable. Yet the basic premise that public services should be universal but personal, collectively financed but responsive to individual need, confers long-term competitive advantage on European economies.
Social solidarity, appropriately instituted, is still the most important foundation for wealth creation and rising prosperity in the industrialised world. In the future, as longevity continues to rise and birth rates fall, this model will be compelled to provide security and opportunities for a radically different demographic structure. The task therefore is to refocus the social model, not dismantle it.
Second, traditional identities and collective solidarities are in a continuous state of flux. This constellation of forces, of social tensions arising from the division of labour in the global economy together with the actual or feared loss of identity, has profoundly altered the politics of class. Industries are relocated and neighbourhoods uprooted as familiar structures of employment slowly disappear, and family life fractures under the strain.
Rising individualism and greater ethnic and religious diversity exacerbate the effects. Migration is both an opportunity providing a rich repository of talent and potential, and increasingly a cause of social division for many countries in the West. We therefore need new rules to manage it.
Third, since the late 1970s, industrialised societies have experienced sharply rising inequalities that pose a renewed threat to social cohesion and common citizenship. The underlying drivers of polarisation have themselves been transformed in the last two decades: lack of skills and marginalisation from the labour market are now the largest single cause of poverty.
There is thus a need to tackle new forms of social exclusion: the cluster of problems associated with poverty, unemployment, family breakdown, crime and drugs. At the same time, the costs of inequality to society as a whole are increasing. In the knowledge economy it is necessary to maximise the human capital of the entire workforce to compete globally. What is right on ethical grounds is essential for the economy too.
Fourth, there is a pressing need to renew the state and its institutions. For too long social democrats, particularly those in the British tradition, had a naïve conception of the state as an instrument that would impose social democratic ‘policies’ at will on the inert civil society. The state was to be the main, even the sole agent of social change. The left should focus on economic and social reform, and simply leave the structure of the polity to take care of itself.
These assumptions have been steadily undermined in recent years, and are now exhausted. That governments of the left have traditionally focused on policy while neglecting process has turned out to be a grave error. In the real world policy and process are inextricably entangled. Hence the search for new methods of devolving political power to regions and nations, reviving local government, and decentralising managerial authority over public services to the frontline. These are intended to reconnect governments and citizens, addressing the pervasive spirit of ‘anti-politics’ while modernising how government itself functions by bringing decision making closer to people.
Fifth, the post-Cold War era poses an unprecedented challenge to global security. This calls for a new progressive internationalism. From the IMF to the UN, the institutions of international order created after 1945 have struggled to re-establish authority and efficacy.
It is imperative that we address the emergence of ‘grand terrorism’: domestic and foreign groups potentially able, with new technologies, chemical and bacterial agents, to threaten cities and regions, as well as the more familiar but steadily growing activities of organised crime groups.
All of these forces, though differing greatly in their specific impact, are ‘common’ in the dynamic effects they are having on our societies, and in the reshaping of social structures they enforce. We have to manage these transitions, enabling everyone to adapt to new conditions and take advantage of new opportunities. We must have the courage to break free of the past, to sweep aside old political ideas and governing structures that no longer fulfil the public purpose.
Our task is therefore to remake the case for modern social democracy in the context of these future challenges. It is not sufficient simply to rely on the purposeful rethinking that has taken place on the left since the late 1980s and the early 1990s. We need a new and distinctive phase of renewal.
Rethinking social democracy requires the radical distinction of means and ends, and it implies maximum flexibility in selecting the tools to realise our values. But such a revisionism must no longer take the political and constitutional status quo as a given. We should reflect on David Marquand’s observation in The Progressive Dilemma: ‘The possibility that it might not be feasible to realise social democratic values with and through a political system permeated with values hostile to social democracy, that if social democrats tried to work through such a system their means might corrupt their ends, did not seem to have occurred to them.’ We need to define a new approach to governance itself.
A more equal distribution of power, not just of wealth or income, is an important goal in its own right for social democrats. Indeed, shared responsibility is also necessary for countering the growing sense of insecurity and distrust. We need to reject the cosy and introverted world in which political power is too often concentrated, to defend genuine freedom of political choice against the threat of perpetual technocracy.
An old social democracy may have died but a new social democracy is showing promising signs of being born. Like progressives a century ago, social democrats must initiate a new politics based on ideas, not just the clash of interests. We must craft an agenda that seizes the opportunities of the future rather than clinging hopelessly to a vanishing past.