Social Democracy After the Cold War

The contributions to this volume provide a comprehensive examination of a politics that has come to be identified as the "new" social democracy.What makes this historic political movement, with its origins in the late nineteenth century, "new" is the transformation that has occurred in its politics, policy, and ideology since the 1980s, but especially through the 1990s.Of course, social democracy has reinvented itself before.Its original ideological roots, at least in Europe, were broadly Marxist, and its political base was the urban working class.In the postwar era, however, shaped by the Cold War and the brutalities of Stalinism, this heritage was largely jettisoned and replaced with a form of progressive Keynesianism and an increasingly heterodox political base that included a growing number of professionals.The social democracy we see today has now abandoned even that commitment to a mixed economy characterized by significant but not dominant public ownership and redistributive social and economic policies.What distinguishes the new social democracy is an embrace of its new "modern" role as a manager of neoliberal restructuring.This transformation was noted by Michael Harrington (1986, 2), who warned that the social democratic Left in power had, Indeed, as a result of the efforts of the "progressive modernizers," for whom modernization "has too often meant deregulation and privatization," social democracy is no longer what it used to be, argues Robert Taylor (2008)."Too many have sought to accommodate or embrace global capitalism," he observes, "with varying degrees of enthusiasm.They continue to see the market as an overwhelming force for good."Social democrats have, moreover, "too often argued that the only way forward is to abandon notions of equality and fraternity . . .and to weaken the state to the advantage of the forces of capital."Through the lens of seven cases -Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, Germany, and Québec this volume seeks to survey and document this turn from the postwar social democracy marked by redistributive and egalitarian policy perspectives to a new social democracy with a role as a "modernizing" force advancing neoliberalism.The contributions here present original insights into how and why this second refoundation of social democracy has occurred and why this is significant in political and policy terms.The selection of these particular cases provides an interesting survey of social democracy.Represented in this sample are

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.