Mainstream parties of the left have been in a state of continuing if uneven decline throughout Europe for the past four decades (Ignazi 2017) and most of the explanations that have been advanced to account for the malaise are widely understood and accepted. On the ‘demand’ side of politics, they have to do with the declining political significance of traditional social cleavages such as class (Mair 1984, 1998), this in turn due to a wide range of economic, social and political changes having to do with rising living-standards, lifestyle changes and the way in which people relate to political parties. On the supply side of politics they have to do with the mediatisation and personalisation of campaigning; the rise of cartel parties (Katz and Mair 1995) and the decline of parties of mass integration; the decline of ideology, and change in the ways parties relate to voters (Manin 1997). More recently, the way in which globalisation has deprived national governments of many of their powers to shape public policy and under-pinned the emergence of the neoliberal consensus has rendered parties of the left vulnerable, in the face of the Great Recession, to the loss of large numbers of their former natural supporters to populist parties of the right. Unable to offer to the so-called losers of globalisation (Kriesi et al. 2006)—economically insecure and uncomfortable with the cultural effects of globalisation especially mass migration—proposals significantly different to those of their conservative rivals, parties of the left have lost out to new outsider parties and political entrepreneurs claiming a unique affinity with ordinary people and their concerns. Less well understood is how the parties of the left have been reacting to these difficulties in terms of organisation, policy reappraisals and communication strategies.
In the initial months of 2019, the European elections of May of that year appeared to offer a unique opportunity to explore these matters, as they looked set to become the most significant in the EU’s history both for the future of the EU itself and for the internal politics of the EU member states. On the one hand, thanks to the EU’s legitimacy crisis, arising from the politics of austerity and migration and the consequent growth of populist parties, these parties looked set to achieve significant advances in the elections and so raise significantly the profile of Eurosceptical actors within the parliament and the institutions of the EU itself. On the other hand, the elections seemed set to break new ground. In the past, they had been considered second-order national elections (Reif and Schmitt 1980)—with domestic policy issues occupying the highest profile in campaigns and voters using the elections as an opportunity to cast protest votes against national incumbents. It seemed likely that for the first time, Europe itself would feature highly in the campaign in many member states—revealing that if in the past European integration had not gone far enough to figure highly in member states’ election campaigns, now it had not gone far enough to prevent it doing so: a point to which we shall return.
In many respects, therefore, it seemed that the 2019 elections offered European parties of the left significant opportunities to attempt to mount a comeback. For with the EU itself occupying a high profile, and with campaigns progressively polarised around the new cleavage dividing anti-system, anti-Euro ‘sovereigntist’ forces from traditional, pro-European, pro-Euro parties, there was an opportunity for the mainstream left to recapture some of the themes of its heyday in the early post-war years. Then, its raison d’être was a fight for the rights of working people built around a commitment to the mixed economy, strong trade unions, market regulation, the welfare state and Keynesian economic management. Of course, all or most of this has disappeared thanks to the economic, social and political processes described above. Moreover, the left finds itself confronted with a divided constituency consisting of the winners and losers of globalisation. However, an increasingly influential strand of thinking on the left argues that the solution to these problems lies in the direction of seeking to recreate the old Keynesian agenda (or something similar) at European level through demands for further integration and the democratisation of EU institutions themselves. For example, in The Globalization Backlash, published not long before the elections, Colin Crouch makes the point that ‘globalization has come for many to mean the loss, not just of individual jobs, but of entire long established industries and the communities and ways of life associated with them’ (2018: 1). That is, for many, an increasingly interdependent world represents a loss of control over the circumstances of their own lives. However, as Crouch goes on to note, ‘[w]e can only gain a measure of control over a world of increasing interdependence by growing identities, as well as institutions of democracy and governance that can themselves reach beyond the nation state’ (2018: 3). In other words, if globalisation has drained power away from national governments, and if its economic and cultural consequences have led traditional supporters of the left into the arms of the nationalist right, then the response of the left must be to seek international collaboration and the pooling of national sovereignty that can allow us to establish democratic governance structures beyond the nation state. The European elections saw the appearance of a new transnational party whose raison d’être was to offer just such an agenda: European Spring, led by the former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis and his Democracy in Europe 2025 (DiEM25) movement. Its message was that while the EU had been an exceptional achievement, ‘bringing together in peace European peoples … across a continent that was, not long ago, home to murderous chauvinism, racism and barbarity’,1 it had also made it possible for international capital to impose austerity, this thanks to the undemocratic way in which it was constituted. Consequently, the nationalist right had gained traction thanks to a lack of accountability in Europe, seeming to present citizens with two equally unpalatable options: either a retreat behind national borders, or surrender to an unaccountable Brussels. Therefore, according to European Spring, the EU would, in the long run, either democratise or disintegrate.
I have elsewhere (Newell 2019) referred to the perspective exemplified by Crouch and European Spring as ‘critical Europeanism’. It is one that is shared by other writers (among which one may include Hilary Wainwright (2018), Ania Skrzypek (2013), and Cäcilie Schildberg et al. (2014)) and organisations (including the think tanks, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, Social Europe and others). In the UK, it is a perspective exemplified by the grassroots organisation, ‘Another Europe is Possible’. Formed in February 2016 ‘to campaign for a Remain position in the EU referendum from a specifically left, progressive perspective’, it now campaigns for the UK’s re-entry into the EU, which it sees as requiring ‘radical and far-reaching reform, breaking with austerity economics and pioneering a radically new development strategy’.2
The suggestion that, for the left, the way back to electoral health lies in a project for European integration and democratisation strikes me as a persuasive one for several reasons. First, it provides an answer to the fundamental question, ‘If (thanks to the collapse of the Berlin Wall) communism appears to be fatally wounded, and if (thanks to globalisation) social democracy is in crisis, then what does it mean to be on the left in the early twenty-first century?’ The question is a fundamental one because you cannot achieve anything unless you first have a clear idea of what it is you want to achieve. There are several aspects to the answer. First, recognition that national communities can only assert regulation of the processes of globalisation by pooling national sovereignty speaks to the traditional internationalist, cosmopolitan agendas of the European socialist parties since their founding in the nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Ever since Marx and Engels elaborated their theories, internationalism, or international solidarity, has been a defining feature of what it means to be on the left. In an early statement of the thesis of economic globalisation, the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party argued that ‘[m]odern industry [had] established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way’; for ‘[t]he need of a constantly expanding market for its products [had chased] the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe’, so that ‘[i]n place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we [had] intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations’. Consequently, the revolutionary abolition of private property would not be possible in one country alone. For, as Engels put it—in ‘The Principles of Communism’ written a few months prior to publication of the Manifesto—‘big industry [had] already brought all the peoples of the Earth … into such close relation with one another that none [was] independent of what happen[ed] to the others’.3 It seemed to follow from this that efforts to bring about the workers’ emancipation would have to be organised internationally and that workers’ parties would have to oppose wars between capitalist states. Such wars, in the words of the resolution adopted at the seventh International Socialist Congress in 1907, were ‘favoured by the national prejudices … systematically cultivated … in the interest of the ruling classes for the purpose of distracting the proletarian masses from their own class tasks as well as from their duties of international solidarity’.4 Famously, the Second International disintegrated as its constituent parties found it impossible to maintain a united front against the outbreak of World War I. However, the tradition of international solidarity lingers on in the opposition of parties of the left—as a general rule—to racism and xenophobia, and—again, as a general rule—in their positive attitudes to cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism.
Second, if to be on the left means to embrace the principle of equality (Bobbio 1994), then the left-wing project is a project of empowerment and therefore democratisation. Working-class movements of the early nineteenth century, such as the Chartists, were movements that sought to extend to workers the franchise that had been won by manufacturers, as well as guarantees on equality before the law, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, the absence of which had until then hampered the development of their organisations. In this sense, a project for a fully integrated, democratic Europe is merely a twenty-first-century example—an extension to the international plane—of demands parties of the left have always made. As is frequently argued on the left, the shortcomings in terms of accountability in EU policy-making provide inroads for the...