ABSTRACT
At one point in the late 1990s, eleven of 15 member states of the European Union (EU) were governed by social democratic parties-on their own, as in the United Kingdom, or as the largest party in coalitions with the greens, liberals or, in some cases, smaller Christian democratic parties. ‘New’ social democracy appeared to have successfully refuted Ralf Dahrendorf’s judgement of 1979-80 that ‘the Social Democratic century has come to an end’.1 Dahrendorf had argued that the working-class milieu and hence social democracy’s core electoral support was deteriorating rapidly while globalization and the new neo-liberal reform agenda of deregulation, privatization and cutbacks in excessive welfare state spending were entirely incompatible with traditional social democratic values and policies. The return of social democracy to government and the rhetorical hype of the ‘Third Way’ seemed to suggest otherwise, however. Perhaps social democratic emphasis on social justice was compatible with more drastic economic restructuring and welfare state reform after all, if social democracy took up communitarian ideas and replaced dependency on guaranteed social security with a new societal solidarity built on ‘empowering’ active citizens as ‘stakeholders’. If any ideological tendency was in terminal decline, it seemed to be Christian democracy and centre-right parties that were unable to develop a new societal vision for the age of globalization at a time when their religious milieus were deteriorating at least as fast. After all, the Democrazia Cristiana (DC) as the dominant Italian political party for more than forty years, had collapsed and fallen apart in the wake of corruption scandals in the early 1990s. The German Christian Democratic/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) not only lost the chancellorship after 16 years in government in 1998, but also received the lowest vote in a national election since 1949, and the CDU became engulfed in 19992000 in a scandal about illegal party funding during Helmut Kohl’s leadership.
