ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter discusses how, in the midst of the transformation of the World Order from the CWO to the NWO, progressive social forces in Britain and France sought to fashion radical and national alternatives to neo-liberalism. The previous four chapters assessed the impact of competing social forces and the transformation of the World Order on Western Europe’s welfare states, the ESM concept and the Social Europe discourse, focusing in particular on the role of hegemonic social forces in shaping and constraining these formations and ideas. This chapter, by contrast, evaluates the attempts of counter-hegemonic social forces – more specifically social democratic and socialist political parties, trade unions and other progressive social forces (i.e. the left) – to develop an enhanced social model on a national basis. That is to say, rather than merely defending the social democratic consensus which underpinned the CWO, with its particular balance of power between capital and labour, from the 1970s the left in Britain and in France sought to radically shift power and wealth from capital to labour and to deepen and widen the welfare state as part of a transition to socialism. The chapter advances three main arguments. First, that the social democratic consensus underpinning the CWO – more specifically its economic, ideological and institutional arrangements – was relatively conducive to the construction of an enhanced social model on a national basis. Second, that although the British and French experiments ended in failure, there was nothing inevitable about this; these attempts at reflation encountered a range of problems, many of which were anticipated, but they were not intrinsically flawed. Third, that these experiments provide some valuable lessons for contemporary progressive social forces that are seeking to defend Europe’s social models against globalization and neo-liberalism. The chapter is divided into four main sections. The first section explores the nature of the economic crisis during the 1970s, which precipitated the transformation of the World Order, and notes the very different solutions to the economic crisis that were advanced. The second section provides an overview of the development of the British left’s AES during the 1970s and 1980s and evaluates why successive Labour governments failed to implement such a programme. The third section provides an overview of the development of the French left’s
Programme Commun du Gouvernement (PCG) during the 1970s and reviews the results of the Mitterrand experiment during the early 1980s. The fourth section looks at some of the broader lessons that can be drawn from these experiments, for social democracy and progressive social forces more generally.
