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 concernsâleading Ignazio Silone and AndrĂ© Philip to argue that no nationalisation has been so successful as the ânationalisation of socialismâ.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 âoverblown fictionâ,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 âfirst secretary of the Socialist International.4 Sassoon argued that the Socialist International âdid little else besides formulate compromise resolutions which never had the slightest importanceâ.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 âweak linksâ 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 âwhy did internationalism fail?â but rather âwhy did it exist?â, 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 Milwardâs idea of European integration as the product of bargaining between national governments, they highlighted the role of âgovernanceâ, 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 Kaiserâs 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 BrandtâKreiskyâPalme network,12 Matthew Broad and Kristian Steinnes the role of the socialist transnational network in the Labour Partyâs 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 Communityâs policy to southern enlargement and its development policies.17 There are other studies on the bilateral or multilateral relations between socialists, for example, Misgeldâs extensive research on the international activities of the Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party (SAP),18 Insallâs book on relations between the British Labour Party19 and the Norwegian Labour Party (DNA),20 Drögemöllerâs 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 historyâs 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 âinternational socialist cooperation resembled a fever more than a forward marchâ, 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 ânormalâ international interactions between socialists. Therefore, it concentrates on the rebirth of the Socialist Internationalâthe focus of most international socialist cooperationâfrom 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 Kaiserâs model is useful, we should question whether international socialist interaction shou...