The Labour Party, Denis Healey and the International Socialist Movement

Rebuilding the Socialist International during the Cold War, 1945–1951

Ettore Costa

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319773469
• eBook ISBN: 9783319773476
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book describes how, after the Second World War, the Labour Party assumed leadership of the International Socialist Movement, thanks to the achievements of the Attlee Government. International Secretary Denis Healey guided the reconstruction of the Socialist International through the early Cold War, making the British vision for socialist internationalism prevail over the French and Belgian. At first, the provisional Socialist International (International Socialist Conference and Comisco) supported cohabitation with pro-communist socialists and the USSR, but with the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe it committed to militant anti-communism. Ambiguity between the Labour Party and Labour Government influenced British policy in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy and Poland, while the characterization and stereotypes of Eastern and Southern Europe shaped the language and actions of the British. Furthermore, the book shows how international contacts and the British and Swedish model encouraged the transition of socialist parties to responsible government parties fully embracing Western democracy and prepared the ideological revision of the 1950s.

© The Author(s) 2018

Ettore CostaThe Labour Party, Denis Healey and the International Socialist MovementPalgrave Studies in the History of Social Movementshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77347-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Ettore Costa¹

(1)

Independent Scholar, Rome, Italy

End Abstract

Socialist internationalism must surely be a true faith if it has survived so long despite the faults of its practitioners. Among the infamous failures are its impotence in preventing the First World War, the paralysing divisions thwarting any action against Fascism , the prioritising of national interests over international concerns—leading Ignazio Silone and André Philip to argue that no nationalisation has been so successful as the ‘nationalisation of socialism’.¹ When talking about the Socialist International, communists, disappointed internationalist socialists and social democrats seeking nationalist respectability insisted on the chasm between internationalist aspirations and national reality. Henri De Man complained about this ‘overblown fiction’,² while Turati melancholically concluded that what was left of the International was the song of that name.³ As is often the case, political historians borrowed the concepts and framework of contemporary politicians as heuristic tools, as it is evident in the older histories of the Socialist International by Braunthal —first secretary of the Socialist International.⁴ Sassoon argued that the Socialist International ‘did little else besides formulate compromise resolutions which never had the slightest importance’.⁵ However, Furet claims, historical players have a false consciousness of their role, and thus historians must be critical of their self-representation.⁶ New knowledge of the Socialist International does not simply require more data from archives and publications, but a theoretically rich framework to analyse this data, pose new questions and test new hypotheses.

This is what Guillaume Devin did in the most important history of the Socialist International, describing how the institution actually worked and how the ‘weak links’ of the organisation influenced the national parties.⁷ Talbot C. Imlay also concentrates on internationalism as practice that influenced national policies.⁸ In their approach to studying internationalism, the question was not ‘why did internationalism fail?’ but rather ‘why did it exist?’, as its advantages are not self-evident. This book adopts a similar approach to explain the actual functioning of socialist internationalism, why it survived so long, which benefits and dangers it bore and how it influenced the life of the national parties. It describes how the British Labour Party assumed the leadership of the European socialist movement and rebuilt the Socialist International from scratch, from the first post-war conference in Clacton in 1946 to its formal rebirth in 1951 in the Frankfurt Congress. It investigates how an era of radical transformation for Europe and the world shaped the form the social democratic parties assumed for decades.

This new approach is made possible by wider developments in historiography, which have made new conceptual tools available and rendered new questions relevant. The growth of global and transnational history challenged the nation state as the exclusive framework; it underscored international connections and non-state actors.⁹ Especially significant was the contribution of Wolfram Kaiser, Brigitte Leucht and Michael Gehler. Correcting Milward’s idea of European integration as the product of bargaining between national governments, they highlighted the role of ‘governance’, defined as a non-hierarchical and decentralised form of decision making, and coordination by state and non-state actors alike.¹⁰ European governance took place at a local, regional, national and transnational level, as formal and informal networks of politicians, experts and interest groups competed to advance their goals and interests.¹¹ Transnational political networks play a prominent role; according to Kaiser’s definition, they link political actors across national borders and coordinate their activities. The integration of national actors into transnational networks influenced their national policies, not by imposing binding decisions, but by communicating interests and concerns, exchanging information, socialising the elites and testing out proposals.

While Kaiser extensively studied the Christian democratic network, others applied the transnational network approach to international socialist cooperation. In addition to the already-mentioned Imlay, Oliver Rathkolb analysed the Brandt–Kreisky–Palme network,¹² Matthew Broad and Kristian Steinnes the role of the socialist transnational network in the Labour Party’s attitude towards the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and the European Economic Community (EEC),¹³ Michael Gehler the role of the socialist network in the Austrian entry to the European Union (EU),¹⁴ Peter Van Kemseke the role of the Socialist International for development policies in the 1950s,¹⁵ Michele Di Donato the relations between the Italian Communist Party and the European Social Democrats,¹⁶ Christian Salm the role of the transnational socialist network in defining the European Community’s policy to southern enlargement and its development policies.¹⁷ There are other studies on the bilateral or multilateral relations between socialists, for example, Misgeld’s extensive research on the international activities of the Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party (SAP),¹⁸ Insall’s book on relations between the British Labour Party¹⁹ and the Norwegian Labour Party (DNA),²⁰ Drögemöller’s book on relations between German Social Democracy (SPD) and the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) ,²¹ and the troubled relationship between the British Labour Party and Italian socialism, studied at different times by Sebastiani, Varsori, Favretto and Nuti.²²

This book owes a debt to previous studies for their conceptual innovation and extensive empirical research. However, some of these instances of research come with the warning that they are special cases, made possible by extraordinary circumstances. This reflects history’s preference for empirical research of individual cases, but if one takes all these studies and treats each warning seriously, one finds multiple examples of the same phenomenon each claiming to be unique. Imlay correctly states that ‘international socialist cooperation resembled a fever more than a forward march’, varying in intensity,²³ but for him the high noon of international socialist cooperation was from 1945 to 1960, for Steinnes it was from 1958 to 1973, for Salm it covered the entire 1970s. Before defining special cases, we have to define normality. There is another problem as well. While certain factors made international socialist cooperation more likely for some parties and in certain periods, it is not enough to discover the initial conditions to describe how the phenomenon evolved. Once begun, international contacts followed their own internal logic. The aim of this book is to describe the logic of ‘normal’ international interactions between socialists. Therefore, it concentrates on the rebirth of the Socialist International—the focus of most international socialist cooperation—from the death of the old International to the formal rebirth of the new. It was an age of experimentation, as socialists discarded old conventions and experimented new forms of international cooperation, establishing the formal and informal rules of socialist internationalism. Throughout this period, the leadership belonged to the British Labour Party: most often it took the initiative to experiment with new ways and always resisted the initiative of others to return to the old ways. The history of socialist internationalism in this period in many ways runs through the Labour Party. As the main agent of the events described, it needs to be the main subject of the book.

What follows are a number of concepts and hypotheses to gain a better understanding of socialist internationalism in practice. These are going to be tested in the empirical research.

While Kaiser’s model is useful, we should question whether international socialist interaction shou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. From the Old International to the New Internationalism (1940–45)
• 3. Parties and People, the Labour Party and the International Socialist Network
• 4. The Labour Party and Eastern Europe, Social Democracy Behind the Iron Curtain
• 5. The Institutional Development, from the International Socialist Conference to Comisco (1946–48)
• 6. The Labour Party and Italy, Social Democracy Below the Olive Line
• 7. ‘The Little Foreign Office of Transport House’, British Foreign Policy and Socialist Internationalism
• 8. The Rebirth of the Socialist International (1948–51)
• 9. Conclusion
• Back Matter