With a combined focus on social democrats in Northern and Southern Europe, this book crucially broadens our understanding of the transformation of European social democracy from the mid-1970s to the early-1990s. In doing so, it revisits the transformation of this ideological family at the end of the Cold War, and before the launch of Third Way politics, and examines the dynamics and power relations at play among European social democratic parties in a context of nascent globalisation. The chronological, methodological and geographical approaches adopted allow for a more nuanced narrative of change for European social democracy than the hitherto dominant centric perspective. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of social democracy, the European Centre-left, political parties, ideologies and more broadly to comparative politics and European politics and history. The Introduction chapter of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

No political parties of present-day Germany are separated by a wider gulf than the two parties of labor, one democratic and reformist, the other totalitarian and socialist-revolutionary. Social Democrats and Communists today face each other as bitter political enemies across the front lines of the Cold War; yet they share a common origin in the Social Democratic Party of Imperial Germany. How did they come to go separate ways? By what process did the old party break apart? How did the prewar party prepare the ground for the dissolution of the labor movement in World War I, and for the subsequent extension of Leninism into Germany? To answer these questions is the purpose of Carl Schorske's study.

In addition to revising our view of the interwar period and the building of European democracies, this book cuts against the grain of most current theorizing in political science by explicitly discussing when and how ideas influence political behavior. Even though German and Swedish Social Democrats belonged to the same transnational political movement and faced similar political and social conditions in their respective countries before and after World War I, they responded very differently to the challenges of democratization and the Great Depression--with crucial consequences for the fates of their countries and the world at large. Explaining why these two social democratic parties acted so differently is the primary task of this book. Berman's answer is that they had very different ideas about politics and economics--what she calls their programmatic beliefs. The Swedish Social Democrats placed themselves at the forefront of the drive for democratization; a decade later they responded to the Depression with a bold new economic program and used it to build a long period of political hegemony. The German Social Democrats, on the other hand, had democracy thrust upon them and then dithered when faced with economic crisis; their haplessness cleared the way for a bolder and more skillful political actor--Adolf Hitler. This provocative book will be of interest to anyone concerned with twentieth-century European history, the transition to democracy problem, or the role of ideas in politics.

An expansive and ambitious intellectual history of democratic socialism from one of the world’s leading intellectual historians and social ethicists The fallout from twenty years of neoliberal economic globalism has sparked a surge of interest in the old idea of democratic socialism—a democracy in which the people control the economy and government, no group dominates any other, and every citizen is free, equal, and included. With a focus on the intertwined legacies of Christian socialism and Social Democratic politics in Britain and Germany, this book traces the story of democratic socialism from its birth in the nineteenth century through the mid-1960s. Examining the tenets on which the movement was founded and how it adapted to different cultural, religious, and economic contexts from its beginnings through the social and political traumas of the twentieth century, Gary Dorrien reminds us that Christian socialism paved the way for all liberation theologies that make the struggles of oppressed peoples the subject of redemption. He argues for a decentralized economic democracy and anti-imperial internationalism.

Social democratic ideology, social democratic political parties, relations with organized labour and business, and foreign policy are considered in this history of social democracy in post-war Europe.

Political history in the industrial world has indeed ended, argues this pioneering study, but the winner has been social democracy - an ideology and political movement that has been as influential as it has been misunderstood. Berman looks at the history of social democracy from its origins in the late nineteenth century to today and shows how it beat out competitors such as classical liberalism, orthodox Marxism, and its cousins, Fascism and National Socialism by solving the central challenge of modern politics - reconciling the competing needs of capitalism and democracy. Bursting on to the scene in the interwar years, the social democratic model spread across Europe after the Second World War and formed the basis of the postwar settlement. This is a study of European social democracy that rewrites the intellectual and political history of the modern era while putting contemporary debates about globalization in their proper intellectual and historical context.

This is a powerful and original survey of German social democracy breaks new ground in covering the movement's full span, from its origins after the French Revolution, to the present day. Stefan Berger looks beyond narrow party political history to relate Social Democracy to other working class identities in the period and sets the German experience within its wider European context. This timely book considers both the background and long-term perspective on the current rethinking of Social Democratic ideas and values, not only in Germany but also in France, Britain and elsewhere.

An analysis of the political development of Western Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which argues that the evolution of nations into liberal democracies, social democracies or fascist regimes was attributable to a set of social and class alliances within the individual nations.