The centre-left parties of western Europe are in retreat. They have lost power in a number of countries in the past few years, even in places where they have governed with some success. The centre left looks set to lose out in Italy and has lost direction in Britain. Four of the five Nordic countries—social democratic societies par excellence—now have conservative heads of government. The German SPD is in power as a junior coalition partner but threatened by a new party to its left; in France the Socialists are in a mess. Is this merely the normal swing of the pendulum, or is it the result of something deeper and more worrying for the centre left?
It is hazardous to try to draw general conclusions from experience in such a wide variety of countries. Yet one thing at least seems clear. This development marks the end of a political-ideological cycle: the centrist technocratic project known as the "third way" in Britain and the Neue Mitte in Germany. It was developed most explicitly in Britain—based partly on ideas borrowed from Clinton's Democrats—but has had influence throughout Europe.
This project enabled the centre-left parties to establish themselves as the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the 1990s. Voter expectations and global political and economic conditions had changed since the mid-1980s, and the centre-left parties proved able to adapt to them. The project's various manifestations had this in common: a combination of moderate neoliberal economic and fiscal policies along with an insistence on the continuing role of the state, including the welfare state, and a liberal-progressive standpoint on cultural issues—proof of an enduringly "progressive" ethos. Labour market reforms and the reorganisation of welfare benefits were coupled with an acceptance of EU-driven deregulation and competition policies (and in some countries privatisation). The centre-left parties presented themselves to the new middle classes as effective managers of capitalism. At the same time, education was allotted huge tasks—indeed, it seemed almost to take the place of redistributive fiscal policy as the main instrument of social reform. The idea was that investment in education would, over time, help solve issues of social justice, unemployment and competitiveness.
From the mid-1990s, this strategy enabled centre-left parties to win elections and to govern more or less successfully. Today, however, the appeal has faded—too many issues have become too difficult to resolve within the technocratic framework of this model. Take the following examples.
Globalisation and Europeanisation have affected European workers' relative economic situation for the worse. Third-way governments have been able to do little to change this. The wage share—the proportion of wages and salaries in domestic income—has fallen in the EU over the last 25 years from 72.1 to 68.4 per cent. In parallel, the number of those in work has increased—the employment rate has risen from 61.2 per cent in the mid-1990s to 64.5 per cent today. This means that more workers are sharing a relatively lower amount of wage income. The Gini index of income inequality has risen in most western European countries since the 1980s. As a consequence, the promise of the reformers—that by means of technocratic reforms within the system they would represent the interests of "ordinary people" better than other parties—has lost credibility.![article body image]()
- At the same time, the main centre-left parties of continental Europe have failed to deliver on their promise that the creation of a more integrated economic and social space within the heartland of the EU would benefit ordinary citizens. Many Europeans are now sceptical about or even opposed to further integration—and not only in France and the Netherlands, where referendums threw out the original European constitution. This reaction is by no means irrational: as successful as the EU has been in creating an area of peace and political stability, its record in promoting economic growth and employment is much less good.
- The "education revolution" has also been disappointing. Youth unemployment in Europe stands at 18.7 per cent. Social mobility has not improved and secondary school graduation rates in the EU have barely changed in 20 years. At the same time, the inadequate financing of higher education has undermined the quality of university degrees and devalued them on the labour market. Contrary to the education and skills rhetoric of the technocrats, most of the new jobs are not in the highly paid sectors of the service economy but at their lower end. And this situation is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future: the British government estimates that 80 per cent of the new jobs that will be created by 2010 will not require a university education.
- At the same time, new challenges have emerged to which the centre left has no adequate response. This applies above all to immigration. Multiculturalism—the left's answer to the significant rise in European immigration in recent decades—has failed. It has led to fragmented societies and ghettos of marginalised minorities in which the mutual frustrations of indigenous populations and immigrants have increased. This applies above all to immigrants from Islamic countries, among whom the second and third generations often have much more hostile attitudes to western society than their elders. For many years the left refused even to debate this issue. Immigration is now the topic on which the activists of the centre-left parties are most at variance with the opinions and expressed interests of their core voters.
- The passive discourse in relation to globalisation that marked the project of the technocratic reform left—a kind of social democratic version of Margaret Thatcher's "Tina" ("there is no alternative") discourse—is no longer satisfying significant parts of the population, who expect a more proactive role on the part of nation states than the new left has so far been ready to offer. In many countries an emotional renationalisation has taken place that is hard to reconcile with the globalisation-friendly and pro-European discourse of the centre-left establishment.
- There are signs that in western societies, a creeping change of values is taking place which the centre-left parties seem not to understand. In some countries the zeitgeist appears to have become conservative once again: opinion polls indicate a slow shift in the direction of traditional values. The sociocultural liberalism and value relativism that have characterised western "hedonistic" societies in recent decades (and which the technocratic reformers could trumpet as a badge of their "progressive" nature) are increasingly being perceived as problematic or dysfunctional. This mood is being picked up by the right: in his successful presidential campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy devoted considerable attention to a "reckoning" with the 68ers; and in the US, the Republicans built their successful election campaigns in 2000 and 2004 on "value issues."
Most of the centre-left parties seem clueless in the face of the decline of their technocratic project. A study conducted by the Fondation Jean-Jaurès quoted one French banlieue resident as saying: "It is not us who have become apolitical; the politicians have become apolitical."
The centre left needs a new political-ideological project that will make it capable of winning elections once again. To use the old language, it needs to be both more "left wing" on social justice issues (without reverting to the old, failed statism), while more "right wing" on cultural and identity issues. The project must free itself of the economism of the third way without surrendering society's "middle ground." There can be no return to the ideas of the 1970s and 1980s. What is required is a discourse which not only acknowledges the ambitions of the population—this was one of the great strengths of the third way—but addresses their fears and confusions too. It must bring to an end the implicit stigmatisation of certain groups—"the losers in the modernisation process"; "defenders of vested interests"—and recognise that the decline of manual labour and of working class communities has left a significant minority of people socially adrift.
If the centre left wishes to become capable of winning elections once more, it must again ground its discourse in voters' real lives. It must show itself capable of transcending its own postmodern, postnational values and more clearly and visibly give priority to the interests of existing citizens (of all backgrounds and creeds). Over the last 100 years, the nation state has been the central instrument of the left in pursuing its political and social aims, and so far it has found no substitute. Many people are hoping for a new, more active role for the nation state as a "protector," not an agent, of globalisation.
The centre left must again show how it wishes to use political power in the interests of centre-left voters. In recent years it has confined this use of political power almost exclusively to the area of "soft," sociocultural themes on the basis of a liberal interpretation of individual rights and group interests, while the "hard" economic and fiscal space has been declared almost a no-go area for left politics. In societies marked by growing inequality and reduced social mobility for the lower and lower-middle classes—and in particular for a welfare-dependent group at the bottom—this cannot continue. (It is perhaps significant, here, that Roger Liddle, a close ally of one of the founders of New Labour, Peter Mandelson, has recently been speaking out against inequality. Mandelson famously said in the mid-1990s that New Labour no longer cared whether people became "filthy rich." Liddle, in a recent paper for the think tank Policy Network, proposed a Top Pay commission to expose excesses and a radical reform of inheritance tax and capital gains tax.)
At the same time, the centre left must resume discussion of longer-term and quality of life issues, and not just in relation to the environment. The rapid social and economic changes of Zygmunt Bauman's "liquid modernity" have led to uncertainty and status anxiety even among the classical middle classes. It is also clear that for a substantial part of the population of western societies, the "economic question" can be regarded as largely solved, at least for now. A narrow stress on economic growth that does not articulate issues of lifestyle and work/life balance has a limited attraction for these groups. This means also that the left, in its search for a new narrative, has to avoid an exclusively negative interpretation of the changes of recent decades and their consequences for society and people's lives—after all, it has to continue to appeal to a significant segment of the winners as well as the losers.
As if these dilemmas were not enough, an additional challenge is facing the left: the right, too, is modernising. In recent years it has said goodbye, at least rhetorically, to neoliberal radicalism and endeavoured to recapture the middle ground. This reorientation amounts to an implicit recognition of the success of the centre left in embedding core elements of its political project in western societies. This "re-centring" of conservatives can be observed, in different forms, in many countries: it underpins the campaign of the leading Republican contender in the US presidential race, John McCain—at least on domestic policy issues. The Swedish Conservatives under Fredrik Reinfeldt committed themselves to retaining the Swedish welfare state and as a result won power against an entrenched and professional Social Democrat elite in 2006. The centre-right CDU in Germany has even allowed the rolling back of some of the labour market reforms of the previous centre-left administration. In Britain, under David Cameron, the Conservative party has undergone a marked shift to the centre. Cameron has declared his support for Labour's investment in public services and its targets on reducing child poverty—and has softened the Tory's "nasty" party image with support for green causes, homosexual marriage and so on. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy laid claim during his presidential campaign not only to the "dignity of labour" and the secular republic, but also to sacred figures of the French left such as Victor Hugo and Jean Jaurès. The strategy of this new "conservatism lite" consists in no longer calling into question the ends of the centre left—a certain degree of social welfare and solidarity, educational opportunity and minority rights—but rather its means. The state, it argues, is an inappropriate instrument for achieving these objectives: it is too costly and often too ponderous. The market, private suppliers and voluntary commitment could do better. It boils down to a conservative version of the slogan on which the SPD in Germany based its campaign against Helmut Kohl in 1998: "We won't do everything differently, but there's a lot we'll do better." This strategy is a sensible one for the new "soft" right, especially in those countries, like Britain, where there has been a marked convergence between the political values of the main voter groups—at least on economic and social issues. The authors of the 2007-08 British Social Attitudes survey noted that, "In the late 1980s there was a clear difference in left-right values between Labour and Conservative supporters… by 2006 the gap had narrowed very significantly."
A counterstrategy for the centre left will have to operate on many fronts, but the role of the state ought to be one theme. If there is a difference between the visions of the new right and the new left, it lies in the question of the future role of the state in the provision of social services and public goods, and in the creation of individual and collective life chances in unequal societies. In times of uncertainty, the idea of a strong, enabling state should look more attractive than a system in which public goods are hived off to the charitable or commercial sectors. But this must, of course, be a state that is responsive to citizens and not afraid to innovate in how it delivers services—the old, inert, bureaucratic state is no friend of the left.
At the end of the Mitterrand era, Lionel Jospin tried to assert a "droit de l'inventaire" for the French left. It is such a "right to take stock" that the European left must now claim in relation to the technocratic reform project of recent decades. The centre left must decide what should be retained and what is inappropriate and outdated. It is time, again, for a serious exercise in revisionism.
