Dissent Magazine: Does European Social Democracy have a Future?

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Does European Social Democracy have a Future?

There is one impressive exception to the conventional wisdom among European social democrats that if you ignore or demonize the new left it will go away. Wouter Bos is the leader of the Dutch Labour Party and currently finance minister in the coalition government that was formed after the last Dutch general election. A young man who two years ago was an unrepentant modernizer in the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown mold, he has been thinking long and hard about the social democratic predicament. Above all, he is concerned about what the threat from the left means, not just for his own party but for the political future of social democracy across Europe. The value of Bos’s analysis—which he presented to the Hertfordshire conference—is that it goes far below the surface of what some seem to regard wrongly as transient and superficial shifts in electoral commitments and preferences. The word crisis is overdone and may still be too strong to describe the outlook for social democracy in Europe, but fundamental social and economic trends suggest it faces an uphill struggle if it hopes to make a strong and effective comeback in the years ahead.

Bos has gone so far as to suggest that European social democracy in its present modernizing form is facing a new and formidable political challenge that threatens its historic dominance on the continent’s center-left. He is concerned with what he sees as the growth in diversity and fragmentation in European societies that are caused mainly by the impact of the dynamic and destructive forces of globalization on everyday life. People are becoming more divided in their own perceived interests and not just by class and gender but by ethnicity, religion, education, family, work, and career patterns as well as in their incomes and the amount of wealth and power they enjoy. National borders in Europe are growing more porous and less relevant with the free movement of capital, goods and services, and now labor through mass migrations.