Socialist Identity, Labour and the SPD: Background to the Security Debate

SOCIALIST IDENTITY, LABOUR. AND THE SPD: BACKGROUND TO THE SECURITY DEBATE Steven Philip Kramer Nei leil Kinnock's unilateralist approach to British security did not come out of nowhere.1 Nor was the West German Social Democratic party's (SPD) August 1986 platform call for withdrawal of intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) from the Federal Republic unprecedented in the history of German or European socialism. What is significant is that major socialist parties of important West European allies have expressed serious opposition to existing security arrangements. These parties have a significant chance of returning to power, if not in 1987, in the near future. One way to understand the security debate in Labour and the SPD is to broaden the context of analysis. First, Labour and the SPD reflect the widespread unhappiness of West European socialism with the state of the Alliance. This unhappiness derives largely from socialism's inability to find solutions to the crisis of the welfare state. Second, the emergence of a pacifist mood in socialism is not surprising because pacifism has been one of the main currents in socialism's 150-year history. Third, there are reasons specific to Labour and the SPD that explain why they have been particularly critical of security policy. 1 . Some of the ideas for this article were developed in a paper prepared for the U.S. Department of State in late 1985 on "European Socialist Parties and U.S. Interests: The German and British Cases." Ken Dillon, Bowman Miller, and E. Raymond Platig provided valuable suggestions . Some material in this article appeared in "Kinnock and the Peace Issue," The Baltimore Sun, 2 December 1986, 15A. I would like to thank Julie Reed of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for preparing the manuscript and my good friend and colleague Hugh De Santis for his insightful critique. Steven Philip Kramer, on leave from the University of New Mexico where he is associate professor of history, is director of the Carnegie Endowment's Face-to-Face program. He is the author of Socialism in Western Europe: The Experience of a Generation (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984). In June 1986 he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Congress in the first district of New Mexico. 37 38 SAIS REVIEW A Socialist Identity Crisis European socialism is undergoing an identity crisis, primarily due to the impossibility of pursuing reformist and redistributive policies during an extended economic recession while lacking practical remedies for the underlying causes of that recession. One consequence of the identity crisis has been a tendency of some socialist parties to take positions on security or foreign-policy issues that bring them into conflict with the United States. The socialist movement has always been subject to an inherent tension : how is it possible to work within the existing system and at the same time represent an alternative vision of society? Before World War I revolutionary and reformist currents coexisted uneasily within European socialism. This tension continued even after the communist schism in 1920. Only following World War II did European socialist parties unequivocally acknowledge that social change should take place through evolution and reform, not revolution. In some cases socialist parties went further. The 1959 Bad Godesberg program of the SPD substituted the creation and perfection of a mixed economy cum welfare state for the ultimate goal ofsocialist transformation. It was an explicit renunciation of Marxism by a party that had once been the guardian of Marxist orthodoxy . The Left stated its claim to power on the ground that it was better qualified than the Right to run the new mixed economy. At the same time, the Labour party rallied against an effort to remove Clause Four (which advocated common ownership of the means of production) from the party program. This act of piety did not, however, change the fact that Clause Four had become a dead letter. Labour's real goal was greater social equality, not state control of the economy. The "end of ideology" was predicated on the ahistorical notion that postwar prosperity would continue indefinitely and that wealth could be painlessly redistributed, thereby resolving the social issue without massive structural reforms. Capitalism was not inherently exploitative but...