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Forging Democracy FORGING DEMOCRACY FORGING DEMOCRACY The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 Geoff Eley 1 2002 1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sa˜o Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and an associated company in Berlin Copyright ᭧ 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eley, Geoff, 1949– Forging democracy : The history of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 / Geoff Eley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-503784-7; 0-19-504479-7 (pbk.) 1. Communism—Europe—History. 2. Socialism—Europe—History. 3. Democracy—Europe—History. 4. Sex role—Europe—History. I. Title. HX239 .E44 2002 940.2'8—dc21 2001052397 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Anna and Sarah, who deserve a better world. Preface between the later 1970s and early 1990s Europe’s political land- scape was radically rearranged. The 1989 revolutions removed the Eastern European socialist bloc, and the Soviet Union dissolved. Through an equally drastic capitalist restructuring, Western Europe was transformed. Whereas socialist parties recaptured government across Europe during the later 1990s, moreover, these were no longer the same socialist parties as before. Profoundly deradicalized, they were separating rapidly from the political cultures and social histories that had sustained them during a pre- vious century of struggle. Communist parties, consistently the labor move- ments’ most militant wings, had almost entirely disappeared. No one talked any longer of abolishing capitalism, of regulating its dysfunctions and ex- cesses, or even of modifying its most egregiously destructive social effects. For a decade after 1989, the space for imagining alternatives narrowed to virtually nothing. But from another perspective new forces had been energizing the Left. If labor movements rested on the proud and lasting achievements built from the outcomes of the Second World War but now being dismantled, younger generations rode the excitements of 1968. The synergy of student radical- ism, countercultural exuberance, and industrial militancy jolted Europe’s political cultures into quite new directions. Partly these new energies flowed through the existing parties, but partly they fashioned their own political space. Feminism was certainly the most important of these emergent move- ments, forcing wholesale reappraisal of everything politics contained. But radical ecology also arrived, linking grassroots activism, communitarian experiment, and extraparliamentary mobilization in unexpected ways. By 1980, a remarkable transnational peace movement was getting off the ground. A variety of alternative lifestyle movements captured many imag- inations. The first signs of a new and lasting political presence bringing these developments together, Green parties, appeared on the scene. In the writings of historians, sociologists and social theorists, cultural critics, and political commentators of all kinds, as well as in the Left’s own variegated discourse, an enormous challenge to accustomed assumptions was generated during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The crisis of socialism during the 1980s not only compelled the rethinking of the boundaries and meanings of the Left, the needs of democracy, and the very nature of politics itself but also forced historians into taking the same ques- tions back to the past. Contemporary feminism’s lasting if unfinished achievement, for example, has been to insist on the need to refashion our most basic understandings in the light of gender, the histories of sexuality, and all the specificities of women’s societal place. More recently, inspired partly by the much longer salience of such questions in the United States and partly by practical explosions of racialized conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s, a similar examination of race and ethnicity has begun. Many other facets of identity joined a growing profusion of invigorating political de- bates. In the process, the earlier centrality of class, as both social history and political category, dissolved. While class remained an unavoidable re- ality of social and political action for the Left in the twenty-first century, the earlier centering of politics around the traditional imagery of the male worker in industry had to be systematically rethought. Conceived in one era, therefore, this book was completed in another. I began writing in a Europe of labor movements and socialist parties, of strong public sectors and viable welfare states, and of class-centered politics and actually existing socialisms. Though their original inspiration was flawed and the Soviet example was by then damaged almost beyond recall, Communist parties in the West remained carriers of a distinctive militancy. In the public sphere, rhetorics of revolution, class consciousness, and so- cialist transformation still claimed a place. With Socialists riding the dem- ocratic transitions triumphantly to power in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, Polish Solidarnosc tearing open the cobwebbed political cultures of Eastern Europe, and French Socialists forming their first postwar government, things seemed on the move. The years 1979–81 were for socialists an en- couraging and even an inspiring time. This gap between optimism and its ending, between the organized strengths of an already formed tradition and the emergent potentials for its succession, is crucial to the purposes of my book. I’ve written it to capture the drama of a still-continuing contemporary transition. To do so required both a detailed accounting of the past and a bold reconstruction of the present because both the achievements and the foreshortenings of the old remain vital to the shaping of the new. Although the century after the 1860s claims the larger share of the book, accordingly, the lines of the later twentieth-century argument are always inscribed earlier on. In that sense, I would argue, history can both impede the present and set it free. More- over, beginning in the 1860s, my account moves forward through a series of pan-European revolutionary conjunctures, from the settlements accom- panying the two world wars through the dramas of 1968 to the latest restructuring of 1989–92. Ultimately, despite the endless complexities of detailed historiographical debate, the agonies of epistemology, and the excitements and frustrations of theory, historians can never escape the discipline’s abiding conundrum of continuity and change. In some periods and circumstances, the given relationships, socially and politically, seem inert and fixed. Culture signifies the predictable and overpowering reproduction of what “is.” It claims the verities of tradition and authorizes familiar futures from the repetitions of viii preface a naturalized past (“what has always been the case”). Politics becomes the machinery of maintenance and routine. The image of a different future becomes displaced into fantasy and easily dismissed. The cracks and fissures are hard to find. But at other times things fall apart. The given ways no longer persuade. The present loosens its grip. Horizons shift. History speeds up. It becomes possible to see the fragments and outlines of a different way. People shake off their uncertainties and hesitations; they throw aside their fears. Very occasionally, usually in the midst of a wider societal crisis, the apparently unbudgeable structures of normal political life become shaken. The expec- tations of a slow and unfolding habitual future get unlocked. Still more occasionally, collective agency materializes, sometimes explosively and with violent results. When this happens, the formal institutional worlds of pol- itics in a nation or a city and the many mundane worlds of the private, the personal, and the everyday move together. They occupy the same time. The present begins to move. These are times of extraordinary possibility and hope. New horizons shimmer. History’s continuum shatters. When the revolutionary crisis recedes, little stays the same as before. Historians argue endlessly over the balance—between contingency and structure, process and event, agency and determination, between the exact nature of the revolutionary rupture and the reach of the longer running pasts. But both by the thoroughness of their destructive energy and by the power of their imaginative release, revolutionary crises replenish the future. The relationship of the lasting institutional changes to the revolutionaries’ willed desires will always be complex. William Morris famously expressed this in A Dream of John Ball:“I...pondered how [people] fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other [people] have to fight for what they meant under another name.”1 Since the 1930s revolutionary sensibility has become ever more tragic in this way, memorably captured in Walter Benjamin’s image of the angel of history, with its back to the future,
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