The European and American Left
since 1945
by Andrei S. Markovits
Dissent Magazine
Winter 2005
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall the European-along with the much
weaker American-left has been in a crisis that has challenged its very
identity. In fact, this profound crisis predated the events of 1989; it was in
full swing by the time the Wall tumbled in good part because of the ineptitude
and moral bankruptcy of at least part of this left. Still, with the events of
1989 and 1990, a period that began in the late 1860s and early 1870s and
entered its political salience in the 1880s came to a close. A political
manifestation and social formation that defined the very idea of progressivism
in the advanced industrial societies for exactly one century collapsed. Some
would say that the radicalism of this period, its revolutionary potential to
transform capitalism, ended with the tragedy of 1914. After all, it was then
that the left realized that its internationalism and perceived universal class
solidarity had lost its primacy to the much more powerful sentiment of particularistic
nationalism. The left's innocence was most certainly lost by the early fall of
1914. Others would date the crisis from the end of World War I, the events of
1918, which already pointed toward the coming of Stalinism in the Soviet Union
and National Socialism in Germany.
Still others see the death of a progressive alternative in the internecine
battle between social democrats and communists that contributed to-though it
wasn't responsible for-fascism's triumph, particularly in Germany. The Hitler-Stalin
pact, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, a replay of that in
Czechoslovakia twelve years later, the Sino-Soviet altercations, the war
between China and Vietnam, the Cambodia fiasco with all its implications- there
were plenty of sobering experiences for the progressive project in Europe. And
yet, it was none of these political events that initiated the fundamental
transformation that was to be completed in 1989. It was really a conjuncture of
social, economic, generational, and cultural shifts that changed the very
identity of the left over the last twenty-five years. At least in this
instance, I will argue for the primacy of economy and society over politics.
I argue that there have been four periods in the history of the left since
World War II that have affected the position of the left today. American
developments will be mentioned only when they were essential contributors to
the shaping of the left in all advanced industrial societies. Although it is
evident that "the left," as commonly understood, was predominantly a
European phenomenon throughout the late nineteenth century and all of the
twentieth century, the United States did contribute significantly to this
political formation precisely in the postwar period.
The Orthodox Period: 1945-1968
I have called the first era the orthodox period because it witnessed a
continuation, by and large, of the left's ideological and political topography
since the Bolshevik Revolution. Whereas 1945 represented a major hiatus in the
arrangement of global politics, it did not alter the essential identity and
topography of the left. Yes, communism seemed ascendant vis-à-vis social
democracy on account of the Soviet Union's emergence as a global power.
Communism was a serious contender for governmental power in Italy, France,
Greece, and Czechoslovakia before it was defeated by American-sponsored
opposition in the first three cases and by Soviet tanks-twice-in the last.
But the political landscape of Western Europe, as delineated by Seymour Martin
Lipset and Stein Rokkan, still pertained. Two fault lines-both of which had
been "frozen" by 1920-defined the identity of "the left."
The first was the external line that separated it from the rest of the
political world, notably liberals, conservatives, fascists, clericalists, and
the representatives of "cleavages" other than the
"owner-worker" cleavage that defined the essence of the left as a
whole.* And second was the internal line that separated social democrats from
communists. The earlier relationship between these two was by and large resumed
during the postwar period. Where social democracy was the stronger of the two
before the war, it emerged so again afterward-and vice versa. The character of
left-wing politics, the culture of socialists and communists, was barely
changed by the war. The working-class-dominated milieus of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries remained by and large what they had been.
Associations, colors, insignia, songs, tastes, and leisure activities that had
been institutionalized in the decades before the Second World War- in many
instances even before the Great War-continued in a completely different world.
Whatever the actual reasons for the predominance of one leftist camp
over the other, there was an obvious North-South divide in Europe during this
period of orthodoxy. The countries north of the Alps (with Finland and Norway
being the useful exceptions proving the rule) exhibited a social democratic
identity, whereas their counterparts to the south embarked on a communist path.
These collective expressions of working-class identity remained largely intact
between 1918 and 1968. One of the most characteristic manifestations of
orthodoxy all over Europe was the domination of the party over the unions. In
the communist as well as the social democratic version, the party was in charge
of "big" politics; that is, all matters pertaining to the state,
society, economy, and culture, whereas the unions' domain pertained almost
exclusively to "small" politics, the realm of industrial relations
however defined. There is, of course, the exception of the British Labour
Party, whose identity and policies were much more directly influenced by the
party's constituent unions than was the case for the continent's three social
democratic giants-Sweden, Austria, and Germany. To be sure, the big union
organizations were major players in these countries' social democracies, but
they took a back seat to "their" parties in politics.
No doubt, the party's primacy over the unions was much more pronounced in the
communist model than in the social democratic one. After all, Leninism had
designed the transmission-belt pattern of party-union relations precisely in
order to eliminate unions as autonomous actors-and thus prevent syndicalist
tendencies from developing as viable options for left politics in advanced
industrial societies (though they did develop in semi-agrarian settings such as
Spain, Italy, and southern France). But even in the social democratic variant,
where no concept equivalent to the transmission belt existed, the party was
hegemonic: it designed strategy, took charge of the theoretical debates, and
prevailed in shaping economic policy. In short, it led, and the unions
followed.
Of course, there were immense differences between social democrats and
communists in this orthodox period. The former had reached an accommodation
with capitalism, even if they had not quite accepted it yet; whereas the latter
still saw their raison d'être in fundamental opposition to the dominant social
system. As a consequence of this difference, communists and social democrats
also found themselves on opposite sides of the cold war, then in a hot phase.
All communists-without exception-rejected the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, opposed the United States, and favored the Soviet Union at least
in some fashion, whereas most social democrats were hostile to the Soviet
Union, if initially also guarded in their support for the West, NATO, and the
United States. This issue contributed to an open break within Italian social
democracy (between the Socialist Party [PSI] and the Social Democratic Party
[PSDI]), and similar fissures-without the ensuing break-opened in German,
British, Danish, and Norwegian social democracy as well. By the mid-to-late
1950s, however, the "Westernizers" had carried the day. For the
ensuing thirty years, social democracy was unequivocally pro-Western. John
Maynard Keynes triumphed over Karl Marx, and the Godesberg platform prevailed
all over Western Europe-well beyond the immediate confines of the German Social
Democratic Party (SPD).
Still, the immense similarities between communism and social democracy were
more characteristic of the orthodox period than the obvious differences. These
in fact rendered them the unchallenged representatives of a clear political
formation that was known to itself and the rest of the world as "the
left." Here are some of these shared traits: both were sociologically
anchored in the male, industrial, mainly skilled working class; ideologically,
both were ardent advocates of growth at all costs; politically, they were
believers in collective arrangements countering the inherent fragmentation of
the market and liberal individualism; strategically, both were hopeful about
"mega" solutions-"mega" state, "mega"
bureaucracies, "mega" technologies, "mega" progress. This
was a time when the left, both social democratic and communist, placed its
hopes in the "clean" energy of nuclear power. The changes that came
in the late 1960s were nothing short of revolutionary, though-in contrast to
the two subsequent periods-they still followed the major vectors of what it
meant to be "left."
The Heterodox Period: 1968-1979
It would not be an exaggeration to say that virtually all the tenets defining
the left during the "orthodox" period were substantially challenged,
if not superseded, by events during the legendary sixties. Thus, it is not by
chance that in Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, the
"'68ers" (achtundsechziger, soixantehuitards) have attained near mythical
status, and generated a considerable nostalgia, in the postwar histories of
these countries' left-wing politics. Be it the events at Berkeley, Columbia,
and the National Democratic Convention in Chicago for the United States;
"the events" in Paris; Italy's Hot Autumn; or the politics of
confrontation embodied by the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) and the
Student Socialist Organization (SDS) in the Federal Republic, there developed a
clear challenge to the existing lefts in each of these societies.
For the first time in the history of the left, the essential impetus for this
development came not primarily from Europe but from the United States.
Concretely, these changes were anchored in two major struggles that informed
American politics at the time: the civil rights movement at home and the
Vietnam War abroad. Both of these developed into absolute icons for all lefts
in the world. Mainly carried by students and not by the traditional subject of
the left-that is, the industrial working class-this massive transformation of
the discourse of the left was deeply anchored in the cultural climate of the
United States, which the rest of the world, particularly Europe's students and
its young generally, embraced with enthusiasm. One cannot understand the rise
of the New Left in Paris, Berlin, Milan, and London without understanding the
massive influence of American rock 'n' roll, folk music, protest songs and
poetry, and the civil rights movement's tactic of the "sit in."
Posters of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Jerry Garcia,
Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Allen Ginsberg adorned the homes of
thousands of European New Leftists alongside such other icons as Che Guevara
and, of course, Ho Chi Minh. On both sides of the Atlantic, this generation was
equally formed by the first seemingly democratic and impromptu rock festival
held in the muddy fields near Woodstock, New York, and by one of Europe's
foremost intellectual émigrés who, unlike others in his immediate milieu,
proudly remained in America while becoming one of this country's most
challenging critics. I am talking about Herbert Marcuse, whom many have-quite
rightly-called the New Left's most influential thinker. The deep American roots
of the New Left in Europe, both in form and substance, are beyond debate.
In notable contrast to the subsequent time period, which entailed a paradigm
shift, the New Left challenge developed within the Marxist paradigm-though it
was profoundly threatening to the existing world of socialist politics. If the
subsequent era was to transcend socialism and develop some sort of
post-socialist politics, New Leftists in the period I have labeled
"heterodox" wanted a "true" socialism, freed from what they
viewed as related perversions: social democracy in the West and
Leninism/Stalinism in the East (though some New Leftists were mesmerized by
Leninism in its Maoist version).
The authority that parties of the established left enjoyed during the orthodox
period eroded in this decade of heterodoxy. On the intellectual level, the New
Left offered a radical critique of the politics of the hegemonic parties. On
the institutional level, there emerged small, but intellectually influential
parties to the left of the traditional social democratic and communist parties
in terms of their programs as well as their strategic approaches. Though small
in actual numbers, these parties represented the legacy of the
"68-ers" in the left's "party space"-a standing challenge
to the orthodox left. The Parti Socialiste Unifié in France might perhaps be
the best example of this genre: small in number of voters, members, and
officeholders, but important in intellectual influence.
On the other hand, the relationship between parties and unions changed
substantially. Several points are worthy of mention in this context:
1. Everywhere in Europe there occurred at this time a clear politicization of
the unions. They expanded their horizons from the confined world of industrial
relations and shop-floor affairs to include issues of "grand
politics" hitherto left to the respective "sister" (or
"mother") party. Unions catapulted themselves into a position of
quasi-equality with "their" parties. On the one hand, they entered
into various macropolitical arrangements with employers and the state that gave
labor an active role in economic management. Even though often defensive in
nature (and also demobilizing), these neocorporatist arrangements signaled a
new union strength. In addition to this activism "from above," the
unions also engaged in an activism "from below." Largely propelled by
a restive rank and file that wanted to cash in on its superb position in a
tight labor market, the unions bargained for the most impressive
"quantitative" and "qualitative" gains attained by labor at
any time in the fifty-plus years of the postwar period. Even though these two
activisms clashed with each other, they emanated from the same optimism, power,
and self-confidence that redefined the role of unions inside the European left
during this period.
2. This, of course, led the unions to distance themselves from their respective
parties. Nowhere was this more obvious than in Italy, where the three union
confederations (allied with different parties) discovered that as many things
united as divided them. Similar, though not as effective, distancing maneuvers
on the part of unions also occurred in Germany, Britain, Sweden, and Austria.
Only in France did the old transition-belt model between the Communist Party
(PCF) and the communist-dominated trade union federation (CGT) remain largely
intact. There too, however, independent union power figured significantly in
the discourse of the left, particularly because the former Catholic union,
sporting the new acronym CFDT, shed its former clericalism and became one of the
most vocal advocates of the New Left.
3. Central to this activism was the role of hitherto marginal elements within
the labor movement. Although labor's core-that is, male, skilled, industrial
workers-also participated in the general mobilization, it was often its lesser
skilled, female, and foreign colleagues who were the political vanguard at the
grass roots and on the shop floor. Add to this group a substantial presence of
tertiary-sector "intellectual" workers, and the new working class had
become a politically meaningful reality.
4. There was also a noticeable "intellectualization" of the labor
movement. Through the influx of a large number of academic researchers, many of
whom were veteran "68-ers," the unions developed a more sophisticated
theoretical approach to problems that until then remained largely beyond their
purview. Union leaders always had a very ambivalent relationship to left-wing
intellectuals, but now a "march through the institutions" on the part
of New Left activists changed organized labor's mentality to a noticeable
degree.
But something wholly new also happened at this time: the rise of left politics
outside of any established institutions, parties, or unions. It was in this
milieu that the new meaning of "leftism" in Europe and the United
States was forged. It was at this critical juncture-the decade between 1968 and
1978-that tendencies developed whose influence persists to this day, in Germany
especially, but also in Europe generally. In my article "The Minister and
the Terrorist" (Foreign Affairs, November-December, 2001), I described
four groupings that emerged at this juncture within the New Left.
I call the first group the "Westerners." Germany's current foreign
minister, Joschka Fischer, is exhibit A. This group, though vehemently against
the war in Vietnam, totally supportive of third world liberation movements, and
bitterly opposed to Western-as well as West German-capitalism, began to reorder
the hierarchy of its negative preferences. Crucial in this reordering was that
tyranny rather than capitalism was put at the top of the list. Put positively,
at the top now was not the emancipation of the working class or even the
liberation of third world peoples from imperialism, but rather democracy, due
process, constitutionalism, and human rights. For reasons that probably have
more to do with the personal psychologies and histories of the relevant
individuals than with macro-sociological factors such as class background,
education, religion, geographic origin, and gender, the Westerners successfully
differentiated between American culture (which they loved, as is evident from
Fischer's well-known admission that Bob Dylan had a greater influence on his
life than Karl Marx) and American politics in the world (which they disliked).
Above all, they did not develop a visceral hatred of all things American. And
they also began to look at the Holocaust as a development sui generis and not
merely as an epiphenomenon of what the rest of the German left then still
called-and continues to call-"fascism" rather than National
Socialism. As a consequence, the Westerners committed a major blasphemy in the
eyes of the rest of the left. They argued that the United States and the Federal
Republic of Germany could-and did-on occasion produce good things, such as a
stable and democratic order in Germany and Europe; and that liberal democracy,
though capitalist, was indeed preferable to tyranny, even of the people's
republic kind. They saw the West also as an occasional force of liberation and
emancipation, not only as one of repression and exploitation. Lastly, members
of this group upheld the value of universalism-already at this time a ready
target for various relativizing particularisms that came to define other groups
on the left, to which I now turn.
The second group I call the "Third Worldists." They considered
imperialism the most important political issue of the day and rejected
everything that the developed world stood for, including Western values and
industrial modernization. The Third Worldists would later constitute the bulk
of the "Fundamentalist" (or "Fundi") wing of the German
Green Party and fight a bitter rearguard action against what they believed to
be the sellouts by Fischer and his "Realos." During the 1970s, the
Third Worldists believed that the Federal Republic was second only to the
United States in its objectionable character. They detested its parliamentary
institutions, disdained its market-based economy, hated its role as a driving
force in modernization's inevitable destruction of the environment, and feared
any manifestation of nationalism, which they saw as a harbinger of the
ever-looming "fascistization" of German politics and society. They were
vehemently anti-Zionist (although not necessarily anti-Semitic) and found in
the Palestinians an emblem of noble suffering and anticolonial resistance.
The third group were the "orthodox Marxists," who located the source
of the Federal Republic's ills not in industrial modernization but in
capitalism. In contrast to all other New Leftists, members of this group
considered the industrial working class not only a worthy ally but as an
"objectively necessary" part of any major social transformation.
Adherents of this tendency reached deep into the SPD and some German trade
unions, notably the metal workers', printers', journalists', writers', and bank
employees' unions. They also developed cozy relations with East Germany, whose
Marxist-Leninist system they regarded with tolerant admiration if not outright
enthusiasm. This group's strength explains why serious criticism of
"actually existing socialism" in the Soviet bloc was unpopular in
parts of the German left well into the 1980s-so much so that the Polish
Solidarity movement was often denounced by German unionists and social
democrats as retrograde and reactionary. (During his JUSO [youth organization
of the SPD] days, the current chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, was closest to
this wing of the New Left.)
I call the fourth and last remaining group the "neo-Nationalists."
The New Left focused mainly on opposing the war in Vietnam, demonstrating
solidarity with developing-world liberation movements, and transforming
bourgeois society. But in Germany it also had a nationalist component provoked
by the country's division and limited sovereignty. Left-wing nationalism has a
long history in Germany (National Bolshevism and the Strasser wing of the
National Socialists are two cases in point), and it is hardly surprising that such
feelings were represented among the '68ers as well. Nationalist sentiment grew
over the controversy surrounding the 1983 deployment of American
intermediate-range nuclear missiles on German soil and was later intensified by
German unification. By the mid-1990s, in fact, a substantial number of '68ers
had completed a journey from extreme left to extreme right, with the constant
factor being their hatred of the West. Today, this antimodernist, anti-Western
sentiment is alive and well throughout Europe among those on the extreme right
and left who invoke nationalism in their opposition to globalization. The two
most prominent German radicals to undergo such a shift are Horst Mahler and
Bernd Rabehl. Along with two other prominent ex-leftists, Mahler-now the far
right National Democratic Party's official legal counsel-recently declared that
the '68er movement had been "neither for communism nor for capitalism,
neither for a Third-Worldist nor for an Eastern or a Western community of
values." Instead, it had been "about the right of every Volk to
assert its national-revolutionary and social-revolutionary liberation." In
this view, the Germans were no exception. Already then, the main root of
Germany's trouble lay in its solid anchoring in the West-controlled by that
double-headed evil, the United States and world Jewry. In marked contrast to
the Third Worldists, adherents to this path developed an anti-Zionism that
could barely, if ever, be differentiated from anti-Semitism.
This is also the period when the left's enmity against Israel, begun in the
wake of the Six Day War of June 1967, became a salient issue for its politics,
its identity, and also its internal divisions. Indeed, I would argue that
perhaps the most defining gauge of where somebody stood politically, how she/he
saw the world, was that ubiquitous triangle of Israel, the Jews, and the United
States. Roughly speaking, to the Westerners, the plight of the Jews was a
serious issue, which meant that they developed a much more favorable view of
Israel than did the other three groups. To the Third Worldists and the orthodox
Marxists, the plight of the Jews-though real-remained unimportant, massively
subordinate to the plight of third world peoples (to the Third Worldists) and
of workers (to the orthodox Marxists). In the nationalist camp, by contrast,
the plight of the Jews was either never acknowledged or even viewed with
outright contempt. It is here that the nexus between the völkisch left and the
völkisch right, which manifested itself so vigorously in the streets of many
German and European cities in the spring of 2002 and again in 2003, was forged.
Paradigm Shift: 1980-1989
In this era most fundamental assumptions of the socialist project underwent
major challenges. Above all, the 1980s witnessed the weakening -perhaps even
severing-of an alliance that once had defined the left, with the working class
as subject of history and driving force of progressive politics. From circa
1880 until 1980, the most fundamental dogma of social democrats and communists
alike was that the working class would be the decisive carrier of social
transformation beyond capitalism. Both theoretically and empirically, there was
a tight logical connection between the working class and the left: not all
workers had to be left, but there could be no left without workers. All other
movements, social groups, and individuals were in principle subordinated to the
working class in the endeavor of attaining socialism. This changed drastically
in the course of the 1980s. Briefly put, the working class lost its position
not only as a theoretically compelling feature of all socialist orientations
but also as an empirical necessity of quotidian politics. This radical change
has three salient features.
1. The appearance of the new social movements and their political offspring,
the Green parties. In the course of the 1970s and increasingly in the 1980s,
progress began to mean almost the opposite of what it did before. The term had
always been associated with some sort of growth, but now the desirability of
growth was questioned, if not entirely rejected. If being left and progressive
meant building dams and steel mills during the previous two eras, it now
implied saving little fish and rare birds from the destruction wrought by those
very dams and mills. The universalism of class as a primary political identity
was superseded by the particularism of groups. Faith previously placed in
technology, centralization, and the state was now conferred upon localism,
decentralization, and community power. The left moved from growth, state,
class, economy, and politics to identity, gender, empowerment, and
deconstruction. Tellingly, much of critical social science, formerly engaged on
behalf of a progressive agenda, was now superseded by an increasingly philosophized
Marxism, which in turn drifted toward literary criticism and various other
poststructural and postmodern intellectual endeavors.
It had become clear by the mid-1980s that green was the left's
trendsetting color instead of the century-old red. Increasingly, also, the
color purple denoted the arrival and staying power of politically meaningful
women's movements in the public arena of all advanced industrial democracies.
Possibly no other change wrought by the New Left had such a tangible impact on
virtually all aspects of private and public life as did the rise and
establishment of the women's movements. In brief, protecting the life-world,
reclaiming lost intimacy, defending vulnerable groups, extolling smallness-all
this replaced the previous faith in the liberating aspects of technology and
the obsession with "mega" projects that had dominated the European
and American left's discourse for exactly one hundred years.
2. The weakening of union power. If the 1970s was the decade of the unions, the
1980s could be called the decade of union setbacks. Absolutely crucial in these
were the massive offensives led by hard-right governments such as Ronald
Reagan's administration in the United States and Margaret Thatcher's in Great
Britain. On every conceivable front and in every country, organized labor
suffered one defeat after another, leading to a substantial weakening of its
position in the political arena and the labor market. The losses covered many
areas: receding or stagnating membership; failure to attain even the most
meager compromises in collective bargaining; seeing the arena and timing of
conflict determined by management; being unable to strike; facing serious
problems with one's "own" parties, be they communist or social democratic;
confronting harsher conditions of production; dealing with a hostile state
preoccupied with creating favorable economic conditions for an increasingly
difficult global economy.
Interestingly, the losses were particularly severe in those countries where
labor had been the least "compromised" by corporatist arrangements
during the previous two decades. In other words, where labor's conflict with
capital remained the "purest" in the sense that it preserved the
market as the main arena and adjudicating mechanism of this conflict, the
unions' setbacks were particularly severe. Thus, the losses incurred by
American and British labor were more profound and long-lasting than those
suffered by German, Austrian, and Swedish labor. Although the political
character of governments mattered, more important still were the deeper social
structures. Thus, for example, even though Helmut Kohl's government in Germany
was by most measures as conservative as Reagan's in the United States and
Thatcher's in Britain, it simply could never roll back labor in Germany to the
same degree. Wherever labor's struggle with capital was mediated by various
public or para-public institutions and neocorporatist arrangements, the losses
were less drastic.
3. Labor's inability to pursue a genuine policy of international solidarity.
Marx got it right: capitalism, an inherently depersonalized and rootless form
of productive relations, was indeed international in its structure, and this
international system of production exploited labor on an international scale.
But just as Marx the social analyst was more often right than wrong, the
opposite is true for Marx the normative thinker, the revolutionary, the
activist, the political man. He believed that because capitalism exploited the
working class internationally, the working class would sooner or later realize
the international dimensions of its predicament and confront capitalism with
its own internationalist solidarity. Alas, we know from too many tragic events
how erroneous this wishful thinking was. If anything, labor has emerged as the
most nationalistic among all major social groups in advanced capitalist
countries. In the United States, Canada, Britain, France, and even in
supposedly "open" and export-oriented countries such as Germany, the
trade unions have consistently been active supporters of some sort of
protectionist measures. And for a good reason: labor indeed stands to lose an
inordinate amount of power and tangible material gains in a "free"
global market subject only to the laws of unbridled capitalism. This is a very
serious problem for organized labor and its progressive allies in advanced
capitalist societies because it fosters an especially problematic
particularism.
Fragmentation and Polarization
1989/1990-Present
With the collapse of Soviet communism and the green and purple challenge to
Western social democracy, the European left has lost the overall coherence of
modernist universalism that defined it for more than a hundred years. On the
one hand, one should rejoice in this development, because Truth and Progress
(with capital letters) were too arrogantly defended by much of the left
throughout the twentieth century. We will most likely be spared any repetition
of the horrors of the GULAG or the genocidal mania of the Khmer Rouge-whose
protagonists claimed to be acting in the name of justice, equality, and
progress. But there exists a more fundamental problem. Although one can still
identify many worthy causes that qualify as progressive, one would be hard-put
to identify a subject of history that-like the working class of yore-could form
the social basis of a unified left. Instead, we witness the proliferation of
groups focused on particular forms of injustice, slighting, and
victimization-in other words, on purely negative experiences. These experiences
may all be real, but the groups that develop around them will remain largely
powerless without the positive institutions of community that were so essential
in the creation of a politically effective working class. And as a consequence
of their powerlessness, they will turn inward, extolling their own
particularism, which will only further fragment an already fragmented left. It
is in this context that the old siren songs of nationalism and neonationalism
seem especially appealing to the lefts of all industrial societies.
A new European (and American) commonality for all lefts-a new litmus test of
progressive politics-seems to have developed: anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism
(though not anti-Semitism, or at least not yet). I cannot think of two more
potent wedge issues that define inclusion and exclusion on the left today. In a
hierarchy of key items defining what it means to be left in contemporary Europe
and the United States-pro-choice, abolition of the death penalty, equality in marital
arrangements and official recognition of gay and lesbian couples by the state;
progressive income tax; economic and social justice; support for third world
claims against the rich first world; multilateralism as opposed to
unilateralism; legalization of marijuana; and on and on-opposition to Israel
and America figure at the very top. If one is not at least a serious doubter of
the legitimacy of the state of Israel (never mind the policies of its
government) and if one does not dismiss everything American as a priori vile
and reactionary, one runs the risk of being excluded from the entity called
"the left." There has not been a common issue since the Spanish Civil
War that has united the left so clearly as has anti-Zionism and its twin, anti-Americanism.
The left divided, and divides, over Serbia, over Chechnya, over Darfur, even
over the war in Iraq. There are virtually no divisions over the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and over the essence of the United States. If one
has anything positive-or even non-derogatory-to say about the United States or
Israel, one always needs to qualify it with a resounding "but."
I remember calling myself a Labor Zionist in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
This was still possible in important circles of the German and the American
left. Being a Dissenter was still acceptable in the large tent of the left.
This has changed. To be sure, there are some small pockets among the German
Greens-though much less in the SPD's milieu-where Israel, Zionism, and America
have not become automatic terms of derision and hatred. Few people will admit
this, but the tone that makes the music is pretty clear. The hegemonic
discourse of the left on both sides of the Atlantic features America and Israel
as identity-defining issues that are largely nonnegotiable.
Finally, it remains an open question whether what is today called
"globalization" is truly unprecedented in its altering of social
relations and human life-as so many claim-or whether it is merely another of
the constantly changing and highly disruptive stages in the longue durée of
capitalism. This question lies beyond my scope here. I only want to suggest
that on virtually all the indicators dear to economists, the restructuring that
occurred at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth
centuries created dislocations far more massive than those produced by
capitalism today. The dislocations of those years shattered the left's
internationalism, led it to embrace centrifugal particularisms, and then to
watch its emancipatory dreams die on the battlefields of Europe. History, of
course, never repeats itself. But to paraphrase a well-known political
economist of the nineteenth century: it appears first as tragedy, the next time
as farce.
Andrei S. Markovits is the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of
Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor. His latest book is called Amerika-Dich Hasst Sich's Besser:
Antiamerikanismus und Antisemitismus in Europa, published in 2004 by
Konkret-Literatur-Verlag in Hamburg. An expanded and amended English-language
version is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. This article is based
on a paper presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political
Science Association.
*Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, "Cleavage Structures,
Party Systems and Voter Alignments: An Introduction" in Seymour Martin
Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments:
Cross-National Perspectives (New York: The Free Press, 1967), pp. 1-64.