In Search of New Social Democracy

Insights from the South – Implications for the North

Olle Törnquist

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755639786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Democracia

Why is the classical social democratic vision of development based on social justice by democratic means losing ground? Why was it so difficult to renew, even in the context of the third wave of democracy in the South? How does this matter in the North too, and how might it be reinvented? This accessible book brings to life major insights gained through written sources and interviews with a large range of activists and political protagonists in the southern cases of Indonesia, India, and the Philippines – but also in the northern social democratic stronghold of Sweden. By considering the experiences in view of the basics of Social Democracy and a broader comparative framework, Olle Törnquist arrives at globally relevant conclusions. Crucially, Törnquist also puts forward suggestions for how to achieve this reinvention social democracy. Through implementation of broad alliances in the Global South, supported by the Global North, for transformative rights and welfare reforms – universal, participatory and impartially implemented - precursors to social economic growth pacts can thus be effected.

Part One

Introduction

1

The mystery – and how to solve it

In a world on the brink, one might have thought that Social Democracy would carry increasing conviction by the 2020s to boost democracy and rights in the face of growing inequalities and conservative movements, climate change, forced migration and pandemics. But the established parties dwindle, and their losses are rarely compensated by radical offshoots. Social democratic ideas are gaining ground in the United States, but Trump lost only by a thin margin. The right-wing groups are still there, and neo-conservatism remains strong among those who feel betrayed by liberalism. Counter-movements have multiplied and protests increased, but organizations are often scattered, alternative programmes incomplete and the pathways rare. Why is the classical Social Democratic vision of development based on social justice by democratic means losing ground? Why does the field lie so open to politicians such as America’s Trump, Europe’s right-wing nationalists, India’s Modi, the Philippines’ Duterte, Brazil’s Bolsonaro and many others? This, perhaps, is the mystery of our time.

This book maintains that the crisis of Social Democracy is global. In the North, historically, its successful models were nationally confined. Today they have been weakened by neoliberal governance, market-driven globalization and conservative reaction. And efforts to rethink the roadmaps have not been convincing, even in the Nordic strongholds. In the South, social democratic-oriented leaders attracted much praise in the context of the third wave of democracy for combining global markets, welfare and popular participation. Yet, there have been serious backlashes, even in showcases like South Africa, the Philippines and Brazil.

Nonetheless, in view of this book, the South is where Social Democracy is most urgently needed, both for common people and because this is where the key to renewal may be found. Economic growth in the South by way of reckless exploitation of people and resources assuaged some of the absolute poverty, until Covid-19, but worsened inequality and remains the supreme global threat to both society and the climate. Similarly, it is the source of forced migration and streams of refugees. There is certainly a need for change in the North as well, but transformation in the South is the lynchpin. Is it feasible? Many analysts say the old conditions in the North that shaped the first generation of Social Democracy are missing in the South. But actually, as this book shows, if one gets to know the problems better, new options appear on the horizon.

WHAT IS SOCIAL DEMOCRACY?

There is a tendency, among radicals in particular, to disassociate themselves from Social Democracy by confining it to the designated mainstream parties. This makes me recall the late 1960s and 1970s, when it was common to avoid problems of political Marxism by defining the ‘eastern regimes’ as inauthentically socialist. That solved nothing. In Chapter 2, this book argues that fruitful analyses call for impartial definitions that are inclusive of several tendencies. The aims and means of classical Social Democracy serve as a point of departure. They boil down to development based on social justice – and by now, environmental justice too – plus the popular engagement and liberal democratic politics required to get there. This book is about different attempts in this direction, irrespective of what the adhering parties and movements call themselves.

Roots of crisis

History is the crucial point of departure. The roots of the crisis of Social Democracy are often neglected. They must be identified and considered in search of a better roadmap. In the North, the challenges occurred with the deregulation of the international exchange rate regime in 1971, which opened up the field for the market fundamentalists. Meanwhile competition from export-driven industrialization in southern Europe and East Asia, as well as the steep rise in oil prices, resulted in insufficient demand for imports in these countries to offset the amalgam of stagnation and inflation in the North. Hence, nationally confined Keynesianism was unviable, and neoliberalism gained ground.

Progressives like Olof Palme and Willy Brandt tried to go beyond ‘Social Democracy in one country’, envisaging a ‘New International Economic Order’ and a ‘North-South Programme for Survival’ in cooperation with the non-aligned movement in the South. But whatever their efforts, the non-aligned partners were not strong enough. Even successful liberation movements did not have much economic clout. The attempts at democratic developmental states in countries such as Indonesia, India and Tanzania had failed or were backsliding. In 1973, another US-nurtured ‘middle class coup’ ousted democratic socialist Salvador Allende in Chile. The oil country leaders continued to cater to themselves, as did the authoritarian low-cost industrializers in the Far East. Even though the United Nations was generally positive towards the New International Economic Order, the outcomes of negotiations were inconclusive and merely pieces of paper. Real power was turning to Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and transnational financiers and companies.

Democratic advances

Even though neoliberal governance and market-driven globalization gained hegemony in the 1980s, emancipatory politics was also in the air. Dictators as well as revolutionaries were overtaken by the new third wave of democracy, after the first slow wave in the nineteenth century and the second when colonialism retreated. In April 1974, the fascists lost out in Portugal and its colonies. In July, Greece followed suit, Spain a year later. On the 30th of April 1975, the Americans fled Saigon. During the 1980s the wave spread to Latin America, and in the Philippines, ‘people power’ did away with the dictator Marcos. Even in Eastern Europe, dissidents began to organize, spearheaded by the Polish Solidarność. In 1989, on the face of it, the fall of the Wall in Berlin and the Velvet Revolution in Prague turned the world to the better.

It is true that earlier in 1989, the democracy movement in China lost out in Tiananmen Square and that in the following year the Burmese democrats – who had been capable of winning elections – were bitterly repressed. But at the same time, the better organized democracy movement in South Africa proved that negotiations were possible, even with racist dictators. In 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) assumed power after a landslide electoral victory. In 1996, renewal-oriented activists in the Indian state of Kerala convinced a mainstream leftist government to support decentralization, along with a ‘People’s Planning Campaign’. Meanwhile in Brazil, progressive unions, social movements, civil society and community activists, including adherents of liberation theology, built a rainbow party, made remarkable advances in local elections and built efficient participatory governance. In May 1998, the seemingly invincible Indonesian dictatorship collapsed and almost everyone claimed to be a democrat. In India, the centre-left governments from 2004 until 2014 acknowledged the need for social reforms along with economic growth. In Latin America, the potential of the ‘Pink Tide’ was signified by the first election (since the 1860s in Mexico) of an indigenous President, Evo Morales, in Bolivia in 2005, and by Brazil’s participatory budgeting and successful fusing of growth and falling inequality under the Workers’ Party (PT) and first-time President, Lula da Silva (2003–11).

New setbacks

During the following years, however, the further hope ignited by the protests against financial speculation, the breathtaking ‘Arab Spring’ and the landslide electoral victories of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma (Myanmar) were steadily dashed. Similarly, most of the previous efforts in Latin America, India and the Philippines fell apart too. Religious identity-politics and right-wing nationalism returned to the fore, this time more averse to migrants and globalization than other nations and free markets. Mainstream social democrats adjusted and leftists did not advance. In the European Union, economic liberals gained ground by reducing political liberties and popular sovereignty in favour of judicial governance, and, as in Singapore, the power of meritocratic professionals – the latter being admired, in turn, by Chinese adherents of cadre-driven governance.

The puzzle

The cardinal question in this book is therefore why reformist social movements, civil society groups and ‘their’ parties were not able to make more of a difference in the context of the third wave of democracy. Why were they – and like-minded partners in the North – unable to generate viable alternatives to market-driven globalization, right-wing populism and technocratic governance? What are the insights in the South and the implications for the North? What can we do?

In retrospect

A few years ago, the setbacks made me want to sum up the studies of social democratic-oriented struggles that I had engaged in for close to half a century – in Indonesia, India and the Philippines, with Scandinavia and to some extent Brazil and South Africa as reference cases. My attempts to summarize these extensive writings, however, generated lengthy and dense texts. Finally, I gave up and developed an alternative.

In this new version, an initial definition of broadly framed Social Democracy in Chapter 2 allows for an open script that focuses in retrospect on the major insights gained and how to make sense of them. When the old pieces were thus put together and considered in wider theoretical and comparative perspective, there were also new insights.

To get there, I have also returned to my notes from interviews and conversations, as well as to logbooks and photographs, in order to reflect on a long journey with scholarly activists and political protagonists on how we addressed the mysteries of political change.¹ Further, maps and figures with historical timelines and some pictures have been added, while the lengthy footnotes have been replaced by an appendix with briefer references to the substantiation given in my previous studies, plus some updates.

As compared to a conventional research report, I hope the present book is thus crisper and more accessible to readers interested in understanding why it has been so difficult to renew Social Democracy, even in the context of the third wave of democracy, why this matters in the North too, and whether and how the basics can be reinvented.

Frame and logic

The architecture of the book is simple. Fruitful studies of the problems and options of Social Democracy call for the revival of history. There has been a lot of ‘letting bygones be bygones’. One example is many liberals’ accommodation of elitist practices as well as political amnesia regarding repression and massacres. Another instance is the new generations of leftists’ obliviousness towards previous attempts at national liberation and democratic developmental states, in pursuit of immaculate new perspectives.

By contrast, this book begins with questions about the history and meaning of Social Democracy. There are three reasons for this: firstly to get a benchmark for discussing how the subsequent generations of Social Democracy have addressed old lessons; secondly, to answer the main question of how globalized economic growth and elitist democracy have affected the preconditions for Social Democracy; thirdly, to also ask if these new conditions – which often differ from those that first shaped Social Democracy – have generated novel thinking and counter-movements.

There is little room for such queries today – either in the predominant discussion of identity politics or within the field of increasingly technocratic political ‘science’, with its special interests in free-floating international relations and quantitative indices of growth and democracy, beyond the realities and contexts where transformative politics have to be rooted and gain strength.

This book tries instead to reclaim the study of historical conflicts and processes in comparative perspective. We shall trace plausible causes and reasons for a number of universal but contextually framed problems and options of Social Democracy. I do this by asking questions of similar efforts in different settings. I shall return to details about Social Democracy and how to study it, but like Inspector Morse, the reader is invited to consider different hypotheses about what has evolved and why.

Fundaments of Social Democracy

Social Democracy is defined in terms of three generations, four cornerstones and five strategies. The details are in Chapter 2, but in brief, the first generation grew out of the industrial revolution in the North. The second generation was part of the emancipatory movements against colonialism, aiming at democratic developmental states. The third generation, since the late 1970s, is rooted in the struggle against authoritarian regimes and extractive capitalist growth, within the wider space created by the third wave of democracy. While the third-generation moderates had much in common with northern leaders like Tony Blair who tried to combine market-driven growth and welfare, its radicals wanted to build democratic alternatives from new popular movements and citizen action on the ground.

Our focus is on this third-generation Social Democracy, but we must also address the legacies of the first and second generations, as they have affected the third. And at present, the challenges of Social Democracy in the South are increasingly important for its revival in the North too.

Irrespective of what generation we are talking about, the general aims and means of classical Social Democracy involve development based on social justice – and these days, environmental equity as well – plus the popular and liberal politics needed to achieve this. These fundamentals may be thought of as a house that is built on four cornerstones, distilled from the literature on Social Democracy in the North as well as the South. The first stone is the formation, organization and coordination of democratic social and political collective actors with common interests. The second comprises efforts at creating equal citizens and making democratic linkages between them and the state. The third involves the struggle for social rights, related welfare policies and rights at work. The fourth concern attempts at economic growth coalitions (social pacts) between labour, agrarian producers and capital, often facilitated by public policies. The bulk of the general strategies to get there were recently well-framed by Erik Olin Wright in terms of dismantling, taming, resisting and escaping capitalism, while the fifth and most crucial one (which he forgot) involves combining these efforts by adding transformative politics and reforms. Together, that is Social Democracy.

Our prime mystery revolves around the challenges of the third-generation social democrats in particular, and their first-generation partners in the North, to defend and renew these cornerstones and strategies. By recalling the historical experiences of developing the fundaments, we can identify the crucial requirements. This is helpful when we search for possible causes and reasons for the current problems of maintaining and developing the foundations.

Contextual dynamics

In addition, these general problems and propositions are affected by the contextual legacies and dynamics of identities, interests and values. Given that they are many, complex and poorly documented, they can rarely be studied in any fruitful way by the quantification of a few variables. Correlations and regressions look like absolute science but may be absolute nonsense. The challenge one faces is, in my experience, like sailing in the Swedish and Norwegian archipelago. One knows the destination and can master the boat. But the charts are not always perfect and the weather and winds often unreliable. Also, the innumerable islands, skerries and underwater stones affect the winds, the waves and the currents. The boat and sails react to other factors as well, including breakdowns and the shortcomings of the helmsperson. In short, there are plentiful unknown influences and variations. An ocean racing friend who was also a computer expert tried to put them all in a program but gave up. And so, if we want to consider the problems and options of Social Democracy, the best we can do is study critical cases in contextual, historical and comparative perspective.

Thematic contrasts

There is one more challenge: we cannot rely on conventional types of comparisons. These either identify differences in similar cases in order to explain varied outcomes or focus on similarities in dif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Legacies of second-generation Social Democracy
• Part III: Challenges of Third-generation Social Democracy
• Part IV: Reinventing Social Democracy
• References
• Consolidated Index
• Imprint