Table Of ContentFORGING DEMOCRACY
FORGING
DEMOCRACY
The History
of the Left
in Europe,
1850–2000
Geoff Eley
1
2002
1
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Eley,Geoff,1949–
Forgingdemocracy:ThehistoryoftheLeftinEurope,1850–2000/GeoffEley.
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1.Communism—Europe—History.2.Socialism—Europe—History.
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For Anna and Sarah,
who deserve a better world.
Preface
between the later 1970s and early 1990s Europe’s political land-
scape was radically rearranged. The 1989 revolutionsremovedtheEastern
European socialist bloc, and the Soviet Union dissolved. Through an
equally drastic capitalist restructuring, Western Europe was transformed.
Whereas socialist parties recaptured government across Europe during the
later 1990s, moreover, these were no longer the same socialist parties as
before. Profoundly deradicalized, they were separating rapidly from the
political cultures and social histories thathad sustainedthemduringapre-
vious century of struggle. Communist parties, consistentlythelabormove-
ments’mostmilitantwings,hadalmostentirelydisappeared.Noonetalked
any longer of abolishing capitalism, of regulating its dysfunctions and ex-
cesses, or even of modifying its most egregiously destructive social effects.
For a decade after 1989, the space for imagining alternatives narrowed to
virtually nothing.
But from another perspective new forces had been energizing the Left.
Iflabormovementsrestedontheproudandlastingachievementsbuiltfrom
theoutcomesoftheSecondWorldWarbutnowbeingdismantled,younger
generations rode the excitements of 1968. The synergy of student radical-
ism, countercultural exuberance, and industrial militancy jolted Europe’s
politicalculturesintoquitenewdirections.Partlythesenewenergiesflowed
through the existing parties, but partly they fashioned their own political
space.Feminismwascertainlythemostimportantoftheseemergentmove-
ments, forcing wholesale reappraisal of everything politics contained. But
radical ecology also arrived, linking grassroots activism, communitarian
experiment, and extraparliamentary mobilization in unexpected ways. By
1980, a remarkable transnational peace movement was getting off the
ground. A variety of alternative lifestyle movements captured many imag-
inations. The first signs of a new and lasting political presence bringing
these developments together, Green parties, appeared on the scene.
In the writings of historians, sociologists and social theorists, cultural
critics, andpoliticalcommentatorsofallkinds,aswellasintheLeft’sown
variegated discourse, an enormous challenge to accustomed assumptions
was generated during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The crisis
of socialism during the 1980s not only compelled the rethinking of the
boundariesandmeaningsoftheLeft,theneedsofdemocracy,andthevery
natureofpoliticsitselfbutalsoforcedhistoriansintotakingthesameques-
tions back to the past. Contemporary feminism’s lasting if unfinished
achievement, for example, has been to insist on the need to refashion our
most basic understandings in the light of gender, the historiesofsexuality,
and all the specificities of women’s societal place. More recently, inspired
partly by the much longer salience of such questions in the United States
and partly by practical explosions of racialized conflicts in the 1980s and
1990s, a similar examination of race and ethnicity has begun. Manyother
facets of identity joined a growing profusion of invigorating political de-
bates. In the process, the earlier centrality of class, as both social history
and political category, dissolved. While class remained an unavoidable re-
ality of social and political action for the Left in the twenty-first century,
the earlier centering of politics around the traditional imagery of the male
worker in industry had to be systematically rethought.
Conceived in one era, therefore, this book was completed in another. I
began writing in a Europe of labor movements and socialist parties, of
strongpublicsectorsandviablewelfarestates,andofclass-centeredpolitics
and actually existing socialisms. Though their original inspiration was
flawed and the Sovietexamplewasbythendamagedalmostbeyondrecall,
Communist partiesin theWestremainedcarriersofadistinctivemilitancy.
In the public sphere, rhetorics of revolution, class consciousness, and so-
cialist transformation still claimed a place. With Socialists riding the dem-
ocratic transitions triumphantly to power in Spain, Portugal, and Greece,
PolishSolidarnosctearingopenthecobwebbedpoliticalculturesofEastern
Europe, and French Socialists forming their first postwar government,
things seemed on the move. The years 1979–81 were for socialists an en-
couraging and even an inspiring time.
This gap between optimism and its ending, between the organized
strengthsofanalreadyformedtraditionandtheemergentpotentialsforits
succession, is crucial to the purposes of my book. I’vewrittenittocapture
the drama of a still-continuing contemporary transition.Todosorequired
both a detailed accounting of the past and a bold reconstruction of the
present because both the achievements and the foreshortenings of the old
remainvitaltotheshapingofthenew.Althoughthecenturyafterthe1860s
claims the larger share of the book, accordingly, the lines of the later
twentieth-century argument are always inscribed earlier on. In that sense,
I would argue, history can both impede the present and set it free. More-
over, beginning in the 1860s, my account moves forward through a series
of pan-European revolutionary conjunctures, from the settlements accom-
panying the two world wars through the dramas of 1968 to the latest
restructuring of 1989–92.
Ultimately,despitetheendlesscomplexitiesofdetailedhistoriographical
debate, the agonies of epistemology, and the excitements and frustrations
of theory, historians can never escape the discipline’s abiding conundrum
of continuity and change. In some periods and circumstances, the given
relationships,sociallyandpolitically,seeminertandfixed.Culturesignifies
the predictable and overpowering reproduction of what “is.” It claims the
verities of tradition and authorizes familiar futures from the repetitionsof
viii preface
a naturalized past (“what has always been the case”). Politicsbecomesthe
machinery of maintenance and routine. The image of a different future
becomesdisplacedintofantasyandeasilydismissed.Thecracksandfissures
are hard to find.
Butat othertimesthingsfallapart.Thegivenwaysnolongerpersuade.
The present loosens its grip. Horizons shift. History speeds up. It becomes
possible to see the fragments and outlines of a different way. Peopleshake
off their uncertainties and hesitations; they throw aside their fears. Very
occasionally, usually in the midst of a wider societal crisis, the apparently
unbudgeable structures of normal political life become shaken. Theexpec-
tations of a slow and unfolding habitual future get unlocked. Still more
occasionally,collectiveagencymaterializes,sometimesexplosivelyandwith
violent results. When this happens, the formal institutional worlds of pol-
iticsin a nationora city and themanymundaneworldsoftheprivate,the
personal,andtheeverydaymovetogether.Theyoccupythesametime.The
present begins to move. These are times of extraordinary possibility and
hope. New horizons shimmer. History’s continuum shatters.
When the revolutionary crisis recedes, little stays the same as before.
Historians argue endlessly over the balance—between contingency and
structure, process and event, agency and determination, between theexact
nature of the revolutionary rupture and the reach of the longer running
pasts. But both by the thoroughness of their destructive energy and by the
poweroftheirimaginativerelease,revolutionarycrisesreplenishthefuture.
The relationship of the lasting institutional changes to the revolutionaries’
willed desires will always be complex. William Morris famouslyexpressed
this in A Dream of John Ball: “I...pondered how [people] fight andlose
the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their
defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other
[people] have to fight for what they meant under another name.”1 Since
the1930srevolutionarysensibilityhasbecomeevermoretragicinthisway,
memorably captured in Walter Benjamin’s image of the angel of history,
with its back to the future, unable “to stay, awaken the dead, and make
whole what has been smashed” and compelled instead to gaze “fixedly”
on the seamless catastrophe of the past, piling “wreckageuponwreckage”
atitsfeet.Theangelispropelledintoanunseeablefuturebyanunstoppable
force, “a storm blowing from Paradise.” “This storm,” Benjamin reflects,
“is what we call progress.”2
Revolutions no longer receive a good press. The calamity of Stalinism
andtheignominiousdemiseoftheSovietUnionhavebeenallowedtoerase
almost entirely the Russian Revolution’s emancipatory effects. Stalinism’s
ferocities during the 1930s and 1940s did irremediable damage to Com-
munism’s ethical credibility, it should be immediately acknowledged, ena-
bling associative allegations against all other versions of socialist ideas.
Justified reminders of capitalism’s destructive and genocidal consequences
for the world, both inside Europe and without, can never dispose of those
preface ix
