Two spectres had been stalking Europe since long before the arrival of Covid-19, exercising malign influences over her society and democracy: neoliberalism and xenophobic nationalism. Neoliberalism, the doctrine that markets should rule human affairs with as little intervention from other institutions as possible, has increased inequality while encouraging obsession with the self and disregard for shared needs. It brought us the financial crisis of 2008 and discourages collective action to combat anthropogenic climate change. Xenophobic nationalism is fostering hatred among members of different ethnic groups and nations.
The destructive nature of both—and the urgent need for the assertion of their opposites, recognition of shared common interests and international co-operation—has been laid bare by the struggle with the coronavirus. Coping with disasters of this kind requires strong and well-resourced public-health and other collective services, with spare capacity to respond to crises, as well as citizens willing to restrain their own activities for the common good. Neoliberalism permits at best minimally resourced public services and has encouraged in us a self-regarding philosophy of se sauve qui peut. Nationalists regard such issues as contagious disease as amenable to solutions within state boundaries, while the researchers who accumulate evidence, and pursue tests and vaccines, work as always in the borderless global community of science.
In the early stages of the pandemic it was right that many governments moved to impose new checks at borders, temporarily suspending the Schengen agreement. It is only at national frontiers that necessary controls over the movement of people can be readily imposed—as the Italian government found when it tried to separate its northern regions, by far the most heavily affected by the virus, from the rest of the country. But this temporary need must not become a permanent preference—as indeed many governments, corporations and people demonstrated as they sought early opportunities to resume contacts again.
Neoliberalism and nationalism are natural enemies: neoliberalism is the main ideology propelling globalisation, the force that is producing the economic and cultural mingling among peoples which nationalists find so offensive. But they are coming together in a cynical alliance, together threatening to become the dominant force in public life—not only in Europe but in many other parts of the world.
Two elements bind them. The selfishness encouraged by neoliberalism chimes well with xenophobia’s rejection of expanding circles of human co-operation. Even more cynically, if politics becomes a game of competing, non-cooperating individual nations, there can be no political action at transnational levels—the only levels at which the much-needed regulation of capitalism, rejected by neoliberals, can be achieved. A further factor uniting these two forces is that they both emanate from the political right, though from different parts of it. Neoliberalism emerges from the anti-egalitarian, economically liberal right; nationalism comes from its socially conservative component.
Together, neoliberalism and xenophobic nationalism promise a world of unchecked and intensifying environmental damage; of increasingly antagonistic and ugly relations among people and nations; and of growing inequality produced by the power of vast corporations, engaging in dangerous financial risks and subordinating the interests of consumers, workers and the general public to their imperative to make profit for their shareholders, far beyond the reach of ‘sovereign’ nation states.
This combination could become the dominant force across Europe. It is today the most powerful alliance in Hungary and the United Kingdom, it has appeared for periods in Austria and Italy and, outside Europe, in Australia, Brazil, India and the United States.
Neoliberalism had already become so apparently popular by the 1990s that its most significant opponents—Europe’s social-democratic parties—started to accept many of its tenets. One consequence was that they were unable to reap any harvest from the global financial disaster of 2007-08, produced by neoliberal deregulation. Instead xenophobic nationalists were able to point the finger at all established parties, as constituting an ‘elite’ purportedly responsible for the disruption of ordinary people’s lives which the crisis engendered. Similarly, today we find important elements in many parties of the left arguing that the only way to counter xenophobic movements is to adopt parts of their agenda and develop the left’s own version of national isolationism.
Is it really impossible to contest these two baleful movements other than by imitating them? Selfishness and hatred are very powerful human motivations and naked appeal to them resonates with many people. But there is evidence all around us of people who act unselfishly, who prefer to work in productive peace with others rather than hate them, for whom co-operation and inclusiveness are virtues rather than objects of scorn, who do not regard ‘foreigners’ as creatures to be kept at arm’s length, or who simply fear moods of incipient violence or just enjoy the variety that a multicultural society brings to their lives. If such people constitute majorities, then the struggle against neoliberalism and xenophobia is far from hopeless. The task is to find a constructive political articulation for these majorities. Two slogans, both curiously emerging from the UK—that neoliberal template and leader of Europhobia—encapsulate what is needed: Better together (used to great effect in the campaign to prevent Scottish independence, but not unfortunately in the Brexit referendum) and Hope not hate (a campaign to combat the wave of hate crime and abusive speech on ‘social media’ that has accompanied Brexit).
If the right is tempted increasingly to rally behind the banners of neoliberalism and xenophobic nationalism, the burden of confronting them is a duty of the left and centre—at its broadest a term which embraces social democrats, socialists, greens and social (as opposed to neo-) liberals. In addition, however, many moderate conservatives and neoliberals are extremely uncomfortable with the turn that the right is taking. We must be alert to opportunities to build the broadest possible coalitions against the twin menace, especially as it uses the pandemic to justify its strategy. There is a serious danger that, if this is not achieved, a determined minority of the hard right will triumph over a fragmented majority ranging from the centre right to the left.
For many years moderate conservatives have seen themselves as the principal guardians of the rule of law and constitutional rectitude. In several countries—Hungary, Poland, the UK, until recently Austria and Italy and, outside Europe, the US—their association with the practices of the far right is destroying that reputation. In all those states and some others it is falling to the liberal left to be the prime defenders of orderly government, in what seems at times to be a losing battle. Moderate conservatives have to decide which company they prefer to keep. Will Christian democrats, in particular, see opportunities for a revival of religious politics in the illiberal Christian movements dominant in Hungary, Poland and the US, or in Pope Francis’ inclusive egalitarianism?
Policies embodying values of co-operation and inclusiveness need to be pursued at all levels of politics, but the European level has particular importance. It is only through action here that these values can be given real practical effect. This will not be easy, as the European polity reflects and magnifies the fragmentation already taking place within individual countries. The EU’s claim to be the prime embodiment of peaceful co-operation and integration is being undermined from within by the rise of xenophobic national parties and governments, and by the union’s own reluctance to challenge these forcefully. Understanding this fragmentation is therefore an essential step to progress.
The fragmentation of democracy
The 20th century bequeathed to us the democracy of large organised blocs. In most of western Europe these blocs, based on class and religious identities, took the form of large social- and Christian-democratic parties, sometimes further sub-divided, accompanied by smaller liberal and some other forces. The blocs were originally rooted in struggles over who had the right to be admitted to citizenship. Individuals could usually understand to which class (or sometimes religious group or ethnicity) they belonged, because they were being excluded from citizenship by virtue of an imposed social identity or they were included in a limited citizenship and encouraged to identify themselves against members of other, excluded, groups. These exclusions were usually defined in terms of property ownership, but that tended to coincide with income groups, which corresponded fairly closely to membership of occupational categories, which were in turn linked to communities and organisations—and hence to classes. This ensemble of attachments conveyed a political identity, as parties engaged in the struggle became embedded in distinct communities. Broadly, the political right became defined as the representative of all included groups seeking the exclusion of outsiders—the left the reverse. Members of religious and ethnic minorities vulnerable to exclusion often allied with the left, even if their class identity would place them on the right; members of religious and ethnic majorities might identify with the right, even if their class position put them on the left. Many people came under conflicting pressures from these processes, some identifying with minor parties which avoided the central dichotomy.
Once formal universal citizenship was achieved, these invidious distinctions were no longer employed in open conflict, but memories of the past continued to confirm the party loyalties they inspired, albeit fading. Meanwhile, employment in the industrial activities that had shaped the classes of much of the 20th century was declining, while jobs grew in various post-industrial services sectors. People working in these have class positions, but not ones that have been defined and given political meaning by involvement in citizenship struggles. Party loyalties based on religious identities have suffered a similar fate, as European societies have become secularised and the churches have relaxed their earlier political stridency.
Political identities have become shallower, less rooted in conflicts that relate shared life experiences to political inclusion or exclusion. Voting has become an experience closer to consumer activity, responding to advertising, rather than the expression of deeply felt social solidarities. Voters change parties more often, or are less inclined to vote at all, and new parties have emerged responding to different concerns. Today’s citizens are in general less amenable to being fitted into large hegemonic organisations, and less likely to have deeply embedded loyalties, than their parents. The big blocs of our inherited parties are fragmenting into a kaleidoscope of varying and temporary allegiances and alliances.
It is difficult for the big bloc parties to accept this and they see their decline as avoidable failure. Naturally, they aspire to return to their former positions. But what is happening is the passing from one era to another—it is no one’s ‘fault’. As has long been the case in Dutch and Danish politics, governments increasingly consist of varying coalitions among groups of parties. The European Parliament itself is an excellent arena for such a politics, as across its 27 member states there are many forms of parties, appearing in diverse domestic coalitions, and the parliament is virtually bound to present a particularly complex kaleidoscope.
Throughout western Europe these changes present challenges to the old bloc parties. Conservative and Christian parties suffer from the declines, first, of an authentic, business-owning bourgeoisie, in favour of an indistinct managerial hierarchy, and, second, of the religious identities which had given these parties their appeal to a mass public. They retain another base, however: their association with the wealthy and successful enables voting for them to be a badge of self-assigned success. Parties of the left, historically associated with the poor and weak, bear the opposite badge. Their decline has therefore been steeper.
There are further complexities in this story. First, left parties have had gains to compensate in part for the decline of the industrial working class. Public employees, once a small group granted privileges by ruling classes to secure their loyalty, have become a mass workforce. Their incomes loom large in public budgets, creating increasing hostility towards them among conservatives and economic liberals committed to low taxation. Increasing numbers now ally with the left. More generally, there is evidence that people working in people-related services activities, whether public or private, are likely to hold liberal, inclusive social views more likely to be supported by left than by right parties. Employment of this kind tends to increase as technology replaces more and more jobs that do not need personal contact.
Secondly, women have increasingly fought against continuing limitations to their full citizenship, a phenomenon strengthened by the fact that they constitute a clear majority of middle- and lower-level positions in post-industrial occupations, particularly public and people-related services. Historically women were more likely to vote for conservative parties than those of the left, partly because of their generally stronger attachment to religion and lower involvement in the paid workforce. Secularisation and changing occupational structures are combining to turn women towards the left, indeed becoming its new vanguard.
Thirdly, as economic, social and cultural contacts among nations have grown, including considerable migration across national boundaries, the national limitations to so-called ‘universal’ citizenship, and the definition of those persons who should be included in a particular political community, have been thrown into question. The nation-state can no longer be the ultimate level of achievement for citizenship and democracy. At the same time, internationalisation provides major opportunities for parties of the right to launch new campaigns for social exclusion—attempting to rally all members of the core national identity, irrespective of their class, in hostility to immigrants and sometimes other ethnic minorities and to engagement with transnational organisations such as the EU.
The first two of these complexities favour the political left, though not necessarily traditional social democracy. The third favours the right, though not in its moderate forms.
The countries of central and eastern Europe (CEE) lack the west’s long history of major bloc parties. Therefore their political structures have for several years anticipated the future the west is now experiencing. Rather than they gradually gravitating towards established western models, the opposite is taking place. Their struggles for citizenship, in the first part of the 20th century similar to those in western Europe, became pre-empted by a state-socialist form that interpreted equal universal rights to mean equal absence of rights. Voting for a single socialist bloc party became more or less compulsory. Campaigns for a genuine citizenship during the state-socialist period had to be clandestine and could therefore establish little mass appeal, more extensive protests being quickly and ruthlessly suppressed.
At the end of the 1980s, a rapid disintegration of the old system gave no time for movements to develop deep roots in the population at large. Attempts after 1990 to establish something like western parties were disappointing, failing to reach far beyond the small groups of brave fighters for citizenship against the socialist regimes. Successful, though still temporary, parties were more likely to be organised around individual wealthy men, brought together in fragmented coalitions to form governments.
Then, starting with Fidesz in Hungary and followed rapidly by Prawo i Sprawiedliwość in Poland, politicians began to discover the potency of nationalism and xenophobia in countries long subordinated to various forms of foreign rule and containing important ethnic minorities disliked by the dominant national ethnicity. Jews had mainly been eliminated from these societies by the Nazi genocide, but the idea of Jews as hated outsiders often survives their actual disappearance as a driver for xenophobic forces. Such parties, often but not always combining nationalism and other forms of social and religious conservatism with neoliberal economics, have rapidly become popular.
These developments present problems and opportunities for most established political families. Some conservatives are tempted to return to the nationalism and reactionary forms of Christianity to which most of them had recourse in the inter-war years—but which had led them to their fatal association with Nazism and fascism. Liberals, in their neoliberal guise, are tempted by the deregulation of the global economy that would follow a retreat from transnational economic governance, but fear the consequent return of protectionism and declining international trade. Meanwhile, their more general liberalism cannot accept the new drive to return to social exclusion.
Some on the socialist and social-democratic left are tempted to reassert the sovereignty of the nation-state, the level at which most of its achievements—the welfare state, systems of organised industrial relations—have been made, but at the cost of abandoning its historical commitment to openness, inclusion and internationalism. Given that the main theme of this manifesto is the advancement of a social-Europe agenda, a theme belonging mainly to social democracy, I shall concentrate on its problems.
The problem for social democracy
The political left has historically been defined by a commitment to equality and the elimination of barriers to it, and therefore support for constantly increasing inclusion into citizenship rights. Its ultimate intentions transcend national and ethnic boundaries to include solidarity with the whole of suffering humanity. If the term progressive is to have any political meaning beyond a vacuous bias in favour of modernisation, it must refer to that idea of gradually expanding inclusion.
But the goal has problematic implications. These were long shielded from us by the existence of the nation-state as the practical limit of feasible aspirations—the national could be presented as the universal. Even then, social-democratic governments, especially in the Nordic world, have long tried to give reality to the wider ambition through generous programmes of aid to poor countries, welcoming asylum policies and active participation in international organisations.
More recently, globalisation, migration flows and the decline of industrial society have severely challenged this stance, provoking a widening gulf between different parts of social democracy’s support base. Its new constituencies among public and other people-oriented service workers, and more generally the populations of thriving multicultural cities, have embraced a transcendence of national boundaries and a general welcome to ever more inclusion. But important parts of its original constituency among male manual workers in manufacturing and mining—today increasingly formerly engaged in manufacturing and mining—have felt very differently. Globalisation, immigration and the growing presence of women in employment seem (mistakenly) to threaten their jobs; immigration and participation in international organisations threaten both a sense of local community and pride in national independence. Social democracy’s two constituencies are moving in opposite directions.
During the 1990s and 2000s many parties, adopting the ideas of the so-called Third Way, sought to resolve this dilemma by wholeheartedly embracing the new, open-minded constituency and ignoring the problems of the old industrial working class. Given a need to choose between the two, this could be justified both practically and ethically. Practically, the new constituency provides the left with an educated support base which is growing and tends to work in the more dynamic sectors of the 21st-century economy. Ethically, the outward-going outlook of this constituency is more compatible with the left’s long-term commitment to inclusion and internationalism.
This choice in turn bequeathed new problems, however, again practical and ethical. Practically, although the old working class continues to decline, it is impossible to form social-democratic majorities without it. Ethically, although many members of this class are today inclined to share the interests of nationalist elites in seeking to exclude outsiders from sharing the good things of life, its own deprivations continue to claim the attention of any decent leftist politics, especially as decline brings bleak prospects.
For some on the far left, the hapless decline of the old working class seems to offer opportunities—the final arrival of the immiseration of the proletariat Marx believed would lead to a socialist revolution. But this is not what is happening. When people believe that history is passing them by, they do not embrace bold, forward-looking causes but turn to narrow, defensive movements which promise to exclude challengers to whatever precarious advantages they retain. Hence not only the xenophobic right but also the neoliberal right, promising low taxes, thrives in such circumstances. People confronting decline can embrace forward-looking and open-hearted values only if they can see their families and communities as part of an optimistic future. Support for xenophobic movements is weakest in cities with distinctly modern advanced manufacturing and services sectors, or that are simply sufficiently large to present workers with a diversity of work opportunities.
The coronavirus crisis has sharpened the choice between these alternative ways in which working people can respond to a serious deterioration in their living standards. Which will triumph: the lessons learned about the value of neighbourliness and mutual interdependence, and the urgency of reducing the market’s inequalities, or a narrow-minded concern to preserve as much as possible of the previous way of life through intensified social exclusion? The biggest danger is that a new form of national socialism, the ideology of Nazism, will emerge: co-operation and collective action, yes; social inclusion and egalitarianism, no.
I have defined the current confrontations with neoliberalism and xenophobia primarily in terms of values. Hardened politicians will regard this as naïve, and point to interests as the primary motivations of voters’ allegiances. But if philosophy and political science know well how to distinguish values from interests, as also emotion from reason, everyday life is not so simple. We usually like to see, or at least to present, pursuit of our interests as having some moral quality. The act of voting in mass democracy itself requires a desire to take part in a collective affirmation of values, as an individual vote has virtually zero practical effect.
Indeed, the expressions of selfishness and hatred that I have attributed respectively to neoliberalism and xenophobia themselves contain strong moral elements. Neoliberal rejection of redistributive taxation and the public provision of services relies heavily on the argument that being poor usually implies fecklessness and a failure to work hard, justifying the self-defined ‘hard-working’ rich and middle-income groups in keeping hold of their money.
Even hatred often has a moral base. The history of the world’s great religions is full of actions of extreme violence, perpetrated in the name of sacred values. Whatever our true motives (if we can ever determine what these are), people and especially political leaders feel a need to present their actions in a moral light. Led by Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the leaders of xenophobic nationalist movements stand for the assertion of traditional Christian, conservative values against materially motivated, amoral liberals and Muslims. They even propagate the conspiracy theory of the extreme right that ‘liberals’ are trying to Islamise the Christian world. When Matteo Salvini was Italy’s minister of justice he was not content with harshness against Muslim refugees seeking to escape to Italy; he would frequently kiss the crucifix and the rosary in public.
An important argument of the protagonists of Brexit has been that, while there would certainly be economic costs in the UK leaving the EU, it would assert the values of national pride and sovereignty, more important than material interests. A theme of their campaign in the Brexit referendum was the allegation that the supporters of membership of the EU wanted to admit Turkey to membership, to expose the UK to immigration from millions of Muslims. This tacitly echoed the Islamisation conspiracy theory, itself a distant echo of the medieval Crusades. In the current climate the left is more likely to lose by neglecting arguments from values than by insisting on them. The rediscovery of sharing, mutual help and the strength of civil society during the pandemic provide a further basis for the left’s ethical appeals.
Our personal political positions are complex amalgams of material interests and moral values. There are always clear cases of people who seem to act politically in direct conflict with their material positions, such as wealthy persons who regularly vote for parties that will tax them heavily. More common are subtler links. People in jobs that mainly involve considerable human interaction are more likely to hold liberal values because work requires them to adapt to and accept a variety of human types in order to get by. Workers who know that by themselves they are economically vulnerable are more likely to support collective values and join trade unions than those who are confident they can manage by themselves. The young are more likely than the old to be worried about climate change and environmental damage, as they will have longer to live under the worsening conditions. These links are just as important in contemporary society as in the past, but the fragmented nature of our lives makes it more difficult to discern how values and perceptions of interest will relate to each other. This is a major reason why political loyalties are fragmenting and the range of parties widening.
In this context, parties need to assert their values as their defining characteristics, and then use their research methods to identify the parts of the population to which these are most likely to appeal. In this context the core defining characteristic of social democracy has to continue to be to work for increasing human inclusiveness and co-operation in pursuit of reducing inequalities. This directly challenges the moral appeals of neoliberalism and xenophobia, but is alone unlikely to rally majorities.
If social-democratic parties are losing their capacity to form single-party governments, they must adapt to becoming part of the kaleidoscope of contemporary politics. If this is primarily about building an agenda for co-operation and inclusiveness against selfishness and hate, that should be a promising task. Greens in particular and also left-leaning liberals are the most obvious partners, but so also might be conservatives rejecting the xenophobic embrace and other minor parties seeking a similar basic agenda.
It is essential that Europe stands at its centre. In a world where so much is globally traded and where damage to the climate and biodiversity cannot possibly be contained within national boundaries, co-operation has to be cross-national and is therefore incompatible with an obsession with national sovereignty, whether of the right or the left. For the European left, this means that the institutions of the EU are central to its objectives and identity—not an add-on for placing in a separate chapter at the end of a manifesto.