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Forging democracy: the history of the left in Europe, 1850-2000 PDF

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FORGING DEMOCRACY FORGING DEMOCRACY The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 Geoff Eley 1 2002 1 Oxford NewYork Auckland Bangkok BuenosAires CapeTown Chennai DaresSalaam Delhi HongKong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata KualaLumpur Madrid Melbourne MexicoCity Mumbai Nairobi Sa˜oPaulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto andanassociatedcompanyinBerlin Copyright (cid:1) 2002 by Oxford UniversityPress, Inc. PublishedbyOxfordUniversityPress,Inc. 198MadisonAvenue,NewYork,NewYork10016 OxfordisaregisteredtrademarkofOxfordUniversityPress Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced, storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmitted,inanyformorbyanymeans, electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording,orotherwise, withoutthepriorpermissionofOxfordUniversityPress. LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Eley,Geoff,1949– Forgingdemocracy:ThehistoryoftheLeftinEurope,1850–2000/GeoffEley. p.cm. Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex. ISBN0-19-503784-7;0-19-504479-7(pbk.) 1.Communism—Europe—History.2.Socialism—Europe—History. 3.Democracy—Europe—History.4.Sexrole—Europe—History.I.Title. HX239.E442002 940.2'8—dc21 2001052397 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica onacid-freepaper 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 revolutionsremovedtheEastern 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 thathad sustainedthemduringapre- vious century of struggle. Communist parties, consistentlythelabormove- ments’mostmilitantwings,hadalmostentirelydisappeared.Noonetalked 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. Iflabormovementsrestedontheproudandlastingachievementsbuiltfrom theoutcomesoftheSecondWorldWarbutnowbeingdismantled,younger generations rode the excitements of 1968. The synergy of student radical- ism, countercultural exuberance, and industrial militancy jolted Europe’s politicalculturesintoquitenewdirections.Partlythesenewenergiesflowed through the existing parties, but partly they fashioned their own political space.Feminismwascertainlythemostimportantoftheseemergentmove- 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, andpoliticalcommentatorsofallkinds,aswellasintheLeft’sown 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 boundariesandmeaningsoftheLeft,theneedsofdemocracy,andthevery natureofpoliticsitselfbutalsoforcedhistoriansintotakingthesameques- 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 historiesofsexuality, 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. Manyother 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 strongpublicsectorsandviablewelfarestates,andofclass-centeredpolitics and actually existing socialisms. Though their original inspiration was flawed and the Sovietexamplewasbythendamagedalmostbeyondrecall, Communist partiesin theWestremainedcarriersofadistinctivemilitancy. 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, PolishSolidarnosctearingopenthecobwebbedpoliticalculturesofEastern 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 strengthsofanalreadyformedtraditionandtheemergentpotentialsforits succession, is crucial to the purposes of my book. I’vewrittenittocapture the drama of a still-continuing contemporary transition.Todosorequired both a detailed accounting of the past and a bold reconstruction of the present because both the achievements and the foreshortenings of the old remainvitaltotheshapingofthenew.Althoughthecenturyafterthe1860s 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,despitetheendlesscomplexitiesofdetailedhistoriographical 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,sociallyandpolitically,seeminertandfixed.Culturesignifies the predictable and overpowering reproduction of what “is.” It claims the verities of tradition and authorizes familiar futures from the repetitionsof viii preface a naturalized past (“what has always been the case”). Politicsbecomesthe machinery of maintenance and routine. The image of a different future becomesdisplacedintofantasyandeasilydismissed.Thecracksandfissures are hard to find. Butat othertimesthingsfallapart.Thegivenwaysnolongerpersuade. The present loosens its grip. Horizons shift. History speeds up. It becomes possible to see the fragments and outlines of a different way. Peopleshake 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. Theexpec- tations of a slow and unfolding habitual future get unlocked. Still more occasionally,collectiveagencymaterializes,sometimesexplosivelyandwith violent results. When this happens, the formal institutional worlds of pol- iticsin a nationora city and themanymundaneworldsoftheprivate,the personal,andtheeverydaymovetogether.Theyoccupythesametime.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 theexact 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 poweroftheirimaginativerelease,revolutionarycrisesreplenishthefuture. The relationship of the lasting institutional changes to the revolutionaries’ willed desires will always be complex. William Morris famouslyexpressed this in A Dream of John Ball: “I...pondered how [people] fight andlose 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 the1930srevolutionarysensibilityhasbecomeevermoretragicinthisway, memorably captured in Walter Benjamin’s image of the angel of history, with its back to the future, unable “to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed” and compelled instead to gaze “fixedly” on the seamless catastrophe of the past, piling “wreckageuponwreckage” atitsfeet.Theangelispropelledintoanunseeablefuturebyanunstoppable force, “a storm blowing from Paradise.” “This storm,” Benjamin reflects, “is what we call progress.”2 Revolutions no longer receive a good press. The calamity of Stalinism andtheignominiousdemiseoftheSovietUnionhavebeenallowedtoerase almost entirely the Russian Revolution’s emancipatory effects. Stalinism’s ferocities during the 1930s and 1940s did irremediable damage to Com- munism’s ethical credibility, it should be immediately acknowledged, ena- bling associative allegations against all other versions of socialist ideas. Justified reminders of capitalism’s destructive and genocidal consequences for the world, both inside Europe and without, can never dispose of those preface ix

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