The crisis of social democracy doesn’t stop at the cliffs of Dover. The late-20th century bargain between the forces of the market and the revisionist left – that the private sector would be left to its own devices in return for footing the bill for new Jerusalems – might have had its most politically and electorally successful exponent on these shores, but it was an idea that spread throughout Europe.
By 2007, it had entered the European mainstream to the point that even Ségolène Royal made it a crucial plank of her election campaign. But she was defeated; coming after the triumph of the centre-right in in Sweden and the defenestration of Gerhard Schroeder, it marked the electoral end of the third way. But the worst was yet to come: the credit crunch made the third way economically, and not just politically, untenable.
Five years later, and the European left’s most common habitat is opposition. With the exception of France, those leftwing parties that are in office do so only as participants in weak and uncertain coalitions. At a European level, the party of European socialists is also in opposition. As Glenis Willmott, Labour’s leader in Strasbourg, put it, ‘It’s not our Europe’.
But the left’s problem is existential as much as electoral; it’s not just the question of getting back the keys to power, but knowing what to do with them afterwards. As the Hollande adminstration has discovered, if you fail to plan, you’ve planned to fail.
‘Relaunching Europe’, a series of events put on by the Alliance of Socialists and Democrats – the parliamentary wing of the party of European socialists – aims to fill that gap. Across policy discussions and breakout sessions, ‘Relaunching Europe’ attempts to create an idea of what ‘our Europe’ might look like.
The result in Nottingham this weekend is an evolving sense of what a revivified European centre-left might look like: thanks to a combination of on-the-ground testimonies, from start-ups and social enterprises, and contributions from politicians and trade unionists from across Europe.
Particularly striking – to me, at least – was the testimony from unemployed young people themselves. I realised how rare it is to hear stories about unemployment in the first person – other, that is, in the form of uplifting prologues in the past tense – and hearing those stories was a stark reminder of the challenges and damage wrought by long-term unemployment.
We began to see what a revivified European left might look like: where the governments of Schroeder, Tony Blair, Wim Kok et al demanded little of the private sector other than revenue, a European-wide jobs guarantee – endorsed by Ed Miliband in his closing speech at the weekend – and a demand for apprenticeships would represent a greater engagement with the market directly than any deployed by a centre-left government in the second half of the 20th century.
Not that the road ahead will be easy or without difficult choices, or that the process of negotiating across 27 different social democratic parties does not present its own challenges. But at Relaunching Europe, we saw the beginnings of a way forward.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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