Many political observers in Western democratic countries equate socialism with statism.1 Surprisingly, from the late 1970s onwards, many socialist elites and experts have helped to nurture this widespread belief, according to which West European socialist parties relentlessly put their faith in the state to solve political problems. In many cases, their proclaimed hostility towards the âbigâ or the ânannyâ state, supposedly adored by their predecessors, is part of a broader strategy aimed at convincing the socialist electorate and activists about the need to redefine the role of the state and roll back its frontiersâalbeit in a very different sense (but not radically so) than the project promoted by their right-wing adversaries. The former leader of the British Labour Party, Tony Blair, was thus undoubtedly one of the most radical and successful supporters of this kind of re-engineered approach to the state, which emerged from the 1980s under Neil Kinnockâs leadership, and culminated in New Labourâs articulation of the Third Way in 1994. In 2003, Blairâs Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, offered a clear and unnuanced narrative of the relationship between the British left and the state that was both clear and historically dubious: âfor nearly a century the left in Britain wrongly equated the public interest with public ownership, and at times came near to redefining one meansâpublic ownershipâas a sole end in itself.â In the same speech delivered to the Social Market Foundation at the Cass Business School, a prominent institution for training future financial global elites, he then urged New Labourâs supporters to revert âto the leftâs old, often knee-jerk, anti-market sentiment, to assert with confidence that promoting the market economy helps us achieve our goals of a stronger economy and a fairer societyâ (Brown 2003).
This volume aims to dispel this reductive, indeed incorrect, account of the relationship between West European socialism and the idea, form, and use of the state. It challenges what remains a dominant interpretation of the leftâs propensity for state intervention in political and journalistic debates. The collection of chapters gathered herein promotes a comparative and transnational approach over the longue durĂŠe, which is likely to produce a better understanding of West European socialism. In so doing, it also casts an original light on the history of the contemporary state in Europe and its intersections both with the social movements of socialism and trade unions and the organised parties of the left, their intellectuals and experts. It is striking that these two topics have rarely been studied together. States are constantly subject to pressure from groups, lobbies, and political parties that strive to control, influence, and shape them. Conversely, they have an impact on these different organisations, and socialist parties are not immune to this influence; confrontation with the Leviathan has led to sometimes extensive transformations and reconfigurations within them. Each of the chapters in the volume dealing with a national case highlights reciprocal influences, transfers of experience, and the circulation of ideas, practices, and actors, but also oppositions between one party and another in relation to the stateâbecause socialism is unique and many-layered, unified and diversified, homogeneous and heterogeneous. Parties claiming allegiance to it have both points in common and differences, which may have faded over time without disappearing for all that. Socialist parties have been exposed to many similar issues in their management of state relations across time but have also come up with a variety of different solutions to the theoretical, strategic, and ideological problem of the state.
A workersâ movement activist born in the first half of the nineteenth century (very presumably a male person) would probably have been surprised if he knew that his successors would invest so much energy in order to take control over the state, and so much effort at transforming an institution that by early workerâs movements was identified as one of the main causes of his exploitation. This was so since the conservative Europe of the Vienna Congress (1814â1815). From the French Revolution to the 1848 Year of Revolution, at a moment in time when labour was becoming globalised and industrialisation was taking off, organisations of international working-class solidarity sprang up despite the hostility of counter-revolutionary states (Bensimon 2014). Socialists and trade unionists, many of them in exile, were the principal actors in these mutual aid organisations that were central in the early socialist movement and whose main centres could be found in London, Paris, and Brussels. They provided valuable support to the workersâ fight against capitalism, the repressive state, and âthe moral authority of established Christianityâ within the nation space (Eley 2002). The revolutionary period of the 1840s was a major turning point in this history of confrontation between the working class and the nation-state. The famous maxim of the Communist Party Manifesto, published in 1848, according to which âthe proletariat has no countryâ should not be interpreted as an unconditional ode to the internationalist cause; indeed, Marx and Engels immediately made clear that âthe proletariat must first conquer political power, must rise to be the dominant class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation and is so far national itself, though not at all in the bourgeois senseâ (quoted in Weill 2005). From the 1860s onwards, the European left started to wonder what to do with the modern state. This problem sparked heated debate within the International Workingmenâs Association (IWMA), with which the names of Marx and Bakunin are associated. Some of its members, while denigrating the imperial and bourgeois state, supported the foundation of a transnational âstate of workersâ, which would have induced a significant degree of centralisation and co-ordination of their organisation; others, among them the anarchist groups but also the British trade unions, continued to deny the state any legitimacy and argued for an international association based on decentralisation and self-help principles (Delalande 2019).
This seminal controversy continued throughout the twentieth century. Although feelings of distrust towards the state never disappeared within socialist and social democratic parties that were increasingly an integral part of their respective national politics, the dominant aim among ruling elites as well as activists was to make the conquest of power an essential goal. The contributions collected in this volume address three crucial issues through which to grasp this phenomenon and its limits: What were the different ideological approaches to the state developed within the socialist and social democratic parties, and how can one explain their early acculturation to the modern state? What have they done with the state and what has the state done with socialists? And finally, how do the reconfigurations of the state, which is no longer the repository but rather the principal administrator of political authority (Genshel and Zangl 2011), affect European socialists, and how do socialists in their turn deal with them?
Understanding Socialism Through the State and the State Through Socialist Parties
As all the authors involved in this work demonstrate, the socialist relationship to and with the state is dense, complex, ambiguous, contradictory, and constantly evolving over time. This represents a challenge to bring together the literature on socialism and that on the state, which have largely ignored each other. A considerable number of academic books and articles by historians, political scientists, and sociologists have been devoted to European socialismâto its origins, development, progress, successes, and crisesâeither by juxtaposing national case studies or by making comparative studies or offering a global approach (Delwit 2005; De Waele et al. 2013; Eley 2002; Grunberg 1997; Lazar 1996; Moschonas 2002; Sassoon 2014 [1996]; Schmidt 2016). In a new preface to the 2014 edition of his history of twentieth-century socialism, however, Donald Sassoon rightly pointed out the centrality of the âcapture of the stateâ in the social democratic project: âHaving correctly identified the state as the principal regulator of the capitalist economy, socialists sought, successfully, to democratize it and use itâ (Sassoon 2014 [1996]). But neither historians of socialism (Donald Sassoonâs book included) nor their colleagues dealing with the history of the modern state ever really addressed this astute comment.
In the 1980s, political scientists started contributing elements of a solution to this puzzle. In the wake of Theda Skocpolâs famous call to âBring the state back inâ, scholars questioned the neo-Marxist theory of a radical autonomy of the state from organised social interests (among them political parties) in policymaking. Many of them argued that political parties (and other societal organisations), even when they were not in office, succeeded in influencing policymaking by mobilising multiple resources and networks.2 But this methodological approach to the relationship between parties and the state remained extremely macropolitical. The former were generally apprehended as monolithic blocs, thereby precluding any detailed study of the strategies their members or sympathisers initiated to penetrate the Leviathan. Since the 2000s, a substantial number of publications in sociology and political science deliberately left aside political parties to focus on the question of the stateâits construction in the national context, its development, its public policies, and its profound changes in the more recent period (Hay 2014; King and Le Galès 2017; Le Galès and Vezinat 2014; Levy, 2006; Manow et al. 2018). No research in these fields aims systematically to theorise socialism and the state together, even though these two entities are at the heart of Europeâs political history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In their important work devoted to the reconfigurations of European states, whose crisis they diagnose, political scientists Desmond King and Patrick Le Galès deliberately leave aside the study of relations between public authorities and state institutions such as courts of justice, parliaments, and political parties. They felt that applying such an approach would have opened up so many new questions that it would have required a second volume. The recent team research coordinated by political scientists Philip Manow, Bruno Palier, and Hanna Schwander does, however, underline the interest of a combined approach to politics and the state in order to gain an understanding of the changes in the different types of welfare state on the European continent over the recent period. They highlight the burden of change in party systems in the return to a more favourable perception of the welfare state in Western Europe at the turn of the 2000s, after two decades during which it had been subject to fierce criticism. This turnaround is explained by the decision of anti-system parties (Capiocca 2002) on the radical left and right to prioritise the welfare state on their political agendasâeven though the welfare chauvinism promoted by the radical right completely subverts the original ideal of universality.
Relying on the body of works on socialism mentioned above, the perspective we offer considers socialist and social democratic parties not as homogeneous and united entities but as competitive organisations with profound ideological divergences, fierce struggles for control of the party apparatus, and continuous confrontations over the correct strategy with which to win power at local and/or national levels, as well as how to exercise this very power. We pay attention to the sociological realities of these parties by discussing their membership and electorate and by considering the way they are embedded in society. Unlike someâincluding recentâresearch which has essentially focused on the party structure only to the detriment of its broader relations with the labour movement (Imlay 2017), the complexity of party reality and its connections with non-political organisations has been taken into account as far as possible. Parties are systems for action which, in most cases, maintain relations with trade unions and associations but also with larger networks of international, national, and local influence. Municipal socialism appears in many countries as a testing ground for training officials who gradually took over the tools necessary for exercising responsibility on the local and national levels. From the late nineteenth century to the post-1945 period, running a town hall was a very effective means for socialist elites of becoming familiar with the language and practices of the state. After several years spent exercising local responsibilities, many town councillors came to think of government authority not as a tool of the dominant class or a system of repression but as a lever enabling social reforms implemented in their towns and cities to be realised on a grand scale (Chamouard 2013; Dogliani 2018). The local experience was thus key for the development of a statist strategy.
To fully understand the socialist acculturation to the modern state in the twentieth century, particular attention should also be turned to the groups of experts who, to a far greater extent than previously, played a key role as intermediaries in the process of accelerated interpenetration between socialism and the state, mainly after 1945 (even though this process started earlier in the Nordic countries). Through contact with these experts or under their impetus, socialist leaders and officials acquired the codes, skills, and language of government which they had mostly lacked in the preceding period. Nowhere else than in Western Europe was this trend so intense. Within this space, the contributors have focused on a certain number of case studies involving France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Austria, Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia, with particular attention to Sweden. In this way, without being e...