Organized as a series of tightly linked, comparative assessments, Mapping the West European Left provides a guide to the state of the left in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain. While all the essays are detailed historical compositions-setting recent crises and dilemmas in a longer perspective reaching back into the postwar settlement-they articulate original insights into the contemporary political conjuncture. Why did Swedish social democracy lose hegemony and direction while its Norwegian counterpart showed unexpected resilience? What was the background to the Danish rebellion against Maastricht? What are the prospects for the SPD and the Greens in post-unification Germany? Should the British Labour Party embrace electoral reform? What propelled the French Socialist Party from triumph to disaster? And why did the Italian left fail to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of the Christian Democrats? Behind the questions explored by the contributors to Mapping the West European Left lie deeper issues concerning the future of radical politics in Europe after the repudiation of Keynesianism and the end of communism. With the individual country analyses synthesized by the editors in a concise and comprehensive introductory essay, this book provides key pointers to the social forces and ideological platforms that offer lines of advance to the left today.

This authoritative survey of the new radical left forming across Europe offers “ammo for the struggles ahead, not to be ignored” (Susan Weissman, award-winning journalist and editor of Victor Serge). In Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, the debt crisis that began with the 2008 global recession helped trigger severe austerity measures. These policies, intended to address government debts, only worsened economic conditions. In response, something happened that few outsiders expected: A massive wave of political resistance erupted across Europe. With mainstream parties largely discredited by their support for austerity, room opened for radicals to offer a left-wing alternative. Collecting provocative, informative, and expert insights from leading scholars across the continent, Europe in Revolt examines the key parties and figures behind this insurgency. These essays and articles cover the roots of the social crisis—and the radicals seeking to reverse it—in Cyprus, England, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden.

On 14 July 1889, the centenary of the French Revolution, socialist parties from all corners of Europe met in Paris. On the same day in the same city, the Exposition Universelle was launched to mark the achievements of capitalist production. The two events symbolized the beginning of the epic struggle between socialism and capitalism in Europe.; In this comprehensive study of a century of socialism, the author traces the fortunes of the political parties of the Left in Western Europe. From the rise of the Bolsheviks to the fall of the Berlin wall, from the Second International through two world wars to the Cold War and the birth of the welfare state, from the working class militancy and student uprisings of the 1960s, through the revival of feminism and the arrival of "green" politics, to the reluctant embrace of market economics en route to the millennium, Donald Sassoon charts the course of socialism across 14 countries.; He shows that throughout their history the fortunes of socialism and capitalism have been inextricably linked. They have grown up side by side, each one challenging and seeking to destroy, yet nourishing and shaping the other.

Wolff explores how Western thinkers contributed to defining and characterizing Eastern Europe as half-civilized and barbaric.

Compiles contributions from leading scholars to analyse how European radical left parties have responded to the ongoing socio-economic crisis that continues to afflict the EU.

Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for reform from within. In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. He contends that the EU’s response to the Eurozone crisis represents the ultimate transformation of the union into a neoliberal citadel that institutionally embeds austerity, privatization, and wage cuts. Concurrently, the rise of German hegemony has divided the EU into an unstable core and dependent peripheries. These related developments make the EU impervious to meaningful reform. The solution is therefore a direct challenge to the EU project that stresses popular and national sovereignty as preconditions for true internationalist socialism. Lapavitsas’s powerful manifesto for a left opposition to the EU upends the wishful thinking that often characterizes the debate and will be a challenging read for all on the Left interested in the future of Europe.

This book helps make sense of the shape of contemporary urban change and describes the way in which cities are central to the construction of place-based political identities.

What has happened to the European radical left after the collapse of the USSR? How has it reacted, reformed, even revived? This new volume is one of the first to provide an overview of the main developments in contemporary European radical left parties (those defining themselves as to the left of, and not merely on the left of social democracy), which are now an increasingly visible phenomenon in European party politics. Unlike many of the existing studies it focuses on communist and non-communist parties, addresses their non-parliamentary and international activity, and takes a pan-European perspective, focusing on both Eastern and Western Europe. March focuses on key contemporary left parties, the nature of their radicalism and their ideological and strategic positions, and overall, addresses their current dynamics and immediate electoral prospects. The book argues that radical left parties are still afflicted by existential crises about the nature of ‘socialism’, and the future of communist parties in particular is under threat. The most successful left parties are no longer extremist, but present themselves as defending values and policies that social democrats have allegedly abandoned, focus on pragmatism rather than ideology and increasingly orientate themselves towards government. Providing a significant contribution to existing literature in the field, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, political parties and radical politics.

Hudson explores the development of communists and other left forces, charting their survival and renewal after 1989. She shows how an open and democratic form of socialism has emerged which embraces environmental, gender and anti-war politics.