Social Europethe journal of theeuropean left

Issue 4March 2006

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Women in

Politics

Contributions byZita GurmaiInger SegelströmGiuliano AmatoJeremy RifkinAlfred GusenbauerDonald Sassoonand others

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Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

‘Social Europe’ celebratesits first Birthday

Henning Meyer Managing Editor

Edi

toria

l

Zita Gurmai ‘What is the Progressive Case for Gender 94Equality?’

Inger Segelström ‘Women in Politics. Every other the only 97Way forward ’

Wendy Stokes ‘Women and Social Democratic Politics’ 98

Giuliano Amato ‘The Future of Europe’ 104

Jeremy Rifkin ‘The real underlying Debate in Europe 106is not the EU Constitution but, rather,the Future of Capitalism’

Alfred Gusenbauer ‘Present and Future of the European 109Union’

Jean-Louis Bianco ‘A Framework Directive on Services of 113General Economic Interest: A Step towards a renewed Social Europe?’(Link to French version)

Donald Sassoon ‘Social Europe and European Identity’ 114(Link to French version)

Jenny Andersson ‘Reflections on the Meaning of 120Social and Liberal’

Carole Tongue ‘European Cultural Diversity in 124& Richard Daniels Broadcasting’

(use the bookmarks in this PDF file to navigate the articles)

Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

Contents

Gender equality is ris-ing up the politicalagenda. With emerg-

ing demographic problemsof ageing societies, low birthrates and the subsequentonset of shrinking labourmarkets, politicians andeconomists from left to right

are coming to the realisation that not only do we needmore women to work, but we also need more womento have more children.

Feminists have been making the social justice argumentfor gender equality for many decades. In a condensedform, this argument goes something like this: womenare equal to men, they deserve to be treated according-ly in all spheres of life - social, economic and political,private and public. This is an irrefutable truth butunfortunately only in some parts of the world has thisargument achieved concrete results. My argument inthis article is that the progressive case for gender equal-ity currently carries more weight if it combines thesocial justice and the economic case, than solely focus-ing on the social justice case.

I will focus exclusively on women in the labour market,what is known in the jargon as women's economicempowerment. There are profound gender equalityproblems elsewhere in society (violence against womenincluding trafficking and prostitution) and politics (lowrepresentation of women) which I will not deal withhere. Achieving greater gender equality in one area haspositive spill over affects in other areas and suchachievements are mutually reinforcing. It is no coinci-dence, for example in Sweden, as Inger Segelstrom hasmentioned in her contribution to this edition, that highlevels of representation of women in Parliament (thehighest in Europe, with women making up 45 per centof MPs) go hand in hand with a high level of femaleparticipation rate (70 per cent).

The jury is still out as to what exactly the progressivecase for gender equality is. It is much easier for socialdemocrats to define the anti-progressive case than topin down and agree on the progressive case. AsMagdalena Andersson cogently argues 'progressive pol-itics has an obligation to fight old-fashioned structures'.I will explore how some policies which claim to be 'pro-gressive' are still operating within the parameters ofthese old-fashioned structures, instead of aspiring tooverturn them.

Over the last few decades, in some parts of Europe,there has been significant progress in achieving thegreater economic independence of women and in par-ticular higher participation levels of women in thelabour market. However, this progress is unevenlyspread and the disparity with men's employment andearnings is still glaringly apparent. In the EU of 25member states, the average female employment ratestands at 55.7 per cent, whilst over 70 per cent of menare in employment. In every member state the employ-

ment rate of men is higher than that of women. Thesmallest employment gap (the difference between per-centage of men and women in work) is found inSweden (2 per cent), the largest in Malta (over 40 percent). Moreover, the gender pay gap remains stubborn-ly high and shows no signs of closing. On average inthe EU, women earn 15 per cent less for every hourworked than men. This reaches higher levels in coun-tries with higher participation rates. Ironically, it is thecountries with low percentages of women in workwhich make this average lower than would otherwise bethe case. Women are concentrated in low-paid sectorseven in the most gender equal societies, such asDenmark and Sweden. Part-time employment alsoaffects women's earnings, with 32,6 per cent of womenworkers in part-time work compared to 7,4 per cent of

94 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

What is the ProgressiveCase for Gender

Equality?by Zita Gurmai

MEP and President ofPES Women

The Progressive Case for GenderEquality currently carries moreWeight if it combines the SocialJustice and the Economic Case

men.Given the status quo of gender equality in the labourmarket, why is the most effective case for gender equal-ity orientated towards economic considerations?Europe is faced with huge demographic challenges, anageing population which is due to decline from 2025onwards. It is not unusual to read headlines which alertreaders to 'Europe's demographic time bomb' and 'rap-idly shrinking labour forces'. Academics from differentdisciplines have been warning us about a potentialdemographic decline for many years but the rest of theworld has only recently been slowly waking up to thereality of it. This is coupled with sluggish growth inmany parts of Europe.

This is where the economic case for gender equalitybecomes so powerful. In terms of economic efficiency,it simply does not make sense to waste the potential ofhalf of the workforce. This case becomes much moreurgent against the backdrop of Europe's current demo-graphic challenges. An ageing population has implica-tions for the public purse. Our economies and welfarestates are not sustainable if there are more people inretirement and fewer people in work, unless there ispension reform, an increase in birth rates and anincrease in numbers of people in employment. Womenhold the the key to two out of three of these solutions.

However, this puts several demands on women: towork more, to have more children and in an ageingsociety the burden for caring for elderly relatives oftenfalls on women. Therefore the key element of a pro-gressive view of gender equality is that women andmen should be enabled by the state to combine workwith parenthood.

Statistics show a new phenomenon emerging. We todayobserve a positive correlation between fertility andwomen's employment rates. High fertility countries alsohave high employment rates for women. Notably in theScandinavian countries, high levels of employment gohand in hand with high fertility rates. Work has becomethe pre-condition for having children.

In an ever-increasingly globalised world of permanentchange, in countries where women are not able to com-bine work and family commitments, they are choosingwork over having children. Southern European coun-tries with traditional gender roles have not been able todeal with the economic uncertainties of globalisationand have some of the lowest fertility rates in Europe.Evidence shows us that in those countries womenwould like to have more children. There is a baby gapbetween the number of children desired and achieved.Women are delaying having children with the averageage of women at the birth of their first child risingsteadily in all EU countries.

Having children has huge implications for a mother'semployment, careers prospects and life-time earnings.Recent statistics show that having children decreasesthe employment rate of women by as much as 14.3

points, whereas it has the reverse affect of driving upmen's employment rates by 5.6 points. Moreover,women with children are more likely to be in part-timework than men or women without children. One thirdof women with one child and half of women withthree or more children work part-time. The number ofchildren has no perceivable affect on men workingpart-time.

Gøsta Esping-Andersen underlines that the differencesbetween the opportunity cost for lifetime earnings forwomen with children is larger in some countries thanothers. In the UK, it is estimated that women with twochildren will forgo approximately 50 per cent of herpotential cumulated life-time earnings, in contrast inDenmark there is hardly any significant loss in life-timeearnings. As he rightly points out, a loss of a woman'searnings does not only affect her adversely but her fam-ily has higher risks of household poverty if she is notin work.

The policy mix for enabling men and women, fathersand mothers, to combine work and family commit-ments must contain three essential elements: universal,affordable childcare provision, shared parental leaveand the changing role of men.

Firstly, the lack of childcare provision in the vast major-ity of member states also makes it economically unvi-able for one of the parents to work. For example inSpain, the cost of a full-year quality care place is equalto a third of an average women's income. In a smallminority of member states, childcare is heavily sub-sidised which enables both parents to combine workand family life. Gøsta Esping-Andersen provides astrong case for investing in universal and affordablechildcare by showing in a cost-benefit analysis that themedium term returns of such an investment far out-weigh the short-term. However, the problem for gov-ernments is that their electorates judge them on short-term rather than medium term achievements. Howeverthere is an immediate economic gain in terms of jobcreation. Esping-Anderson predicts a job multipliereffect for which every 100 jobs that women are enabledto keep or go back to, 10 jobs are created in the serviceeconomy (carers, cleaners etc).

Secondly, the right balance has to be struck for leaveentitlements. If parental leave is too long, the chancesof discrimination against women increase and employ-ers are unlikely to invest in the skills of women ofchildbearing age. If parental leave is too short, there isincreased probability that the mother will decide to stayat home longer and thus lose her connection with thelabour market. Provisions in some member states havetried to encourage men to take their share of parentalleave. Some feminists argue that this is the only way tofight discrimination in the labour market. Men of child-bearing age will thus be regarded as having the samerisks (in terms of taking leave provisions) as women.However, we are a long way from that situation. Arecent Eurobarometer survey found that 75 per cent of

95 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

men were aware of their right to take parental leave but85 per cent said that they would not take it. Even in thedeeply progressive and social democratic country ofSweden only 15 per cent of men take up parental leave.Various factors account for this widespread reluctance.Stereotypes certainly contribute as does the lack or lossof remuneration in some countries during parentalleave. The persistence of the gender pay gap con-tributes to this phenomenon in cases in which thefather earns more than the mother. Parental leaveschemes which encourage the father to take up part ofthe leave (in Iceland half the parental leave will be lostif the father does not take it) and compensate wage lev-els need to be put in place. Moreover, stereotypes mustbe broken down, which is not necessarily somethingthat one can legislate for.

Achieving greater gender equality requires not only aliberation for women but also for men. The stereotypesof the male breadwinner should be a thing of the pastbut there is still a residual notion of this. This also hasimplications for earnings (with women concentrated inlow-paid sectors) and the role of men and women inthe home. The statistics show that very few men takeany responsibility for domestic tasks. A culture changeis needed, it has started but the pace is too slow inmany parts of Europe.

It might seem simplistic to reduce the policy mix tothese three elements but an overhaul of the current sys-tem, especially a revolution in childcare, is what is need-ed. There is an over-reliance in some parts of Europeon part-time work. I believe that promoting part-timework, instead of concentrating our efforts on childcare,is not the right progressive approach to gender equali-ty.

The proponents of part-time work argue that womenwant to work part-time. I concede that it might be thecase that some mothers, just as some fathers, mightwant to work part-time during the early years of their

children's lives. However, we cannot quote the figure ofthose working part-time as an indication of those who'choose' to work part-time because a lot of workingparents simply do not have that choice due to under-investment in childcare and pre-schooling. We shouldnot be satisfied with this second best alternative.

Moreover, part-time work is generally paid at a lowlevel and at low seniority levels. In some member states,it contributes significantly to the gender pay gap. Forexample in the UK, the gender pay in part-time workstands at over 40 per cent. This has implications forwell-qualified women whose skills are underused whenthey are part-time.

Some have suggested that we need to focus on creatingbetter quality part-time work. It might be the case thatwe can successfully encourage job-sharing of high levelposts in public services and charities. However, compa-nies do not have the economic incentive to offer jobshares, especially in systems in which it is more expen-sive to pay two people instead of one. Social democ-rats, however, are not necessarily in agreement on this.As I mentioned above the jury is still out on the pro-gressive case for gender equality.

In conclusion, the demographic challenges we face adda fresh economic impetus for greater gender equality.European politicians and policy makers are beginningto realise that the only way to succeed in a globalisedworld of an ageing population is to enable women toboth work more and have more children. The childcarerevolution should be our top priority. There is also astrong economic case for this in terms of job creation.Enabling both parents to work full-time, whilst balanc-ing work and family commitments should be our aspi-ration, not some kind of half-way house in which ahigh percentage of women work part-time and are thusundervalued and underpaid.

96 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

References

Andersson, Magdalena (2005): Why gender equality?, in: Giddens, Anthony, Patrick Diamond eds (2005): TheNew Egalitarianism, Polity.

European Commission’s report on Gender Equality, 2006.

Esping-Andersen, Gøsta (2003): Women in the new welfare equilibrium, in: Auer, Peter, Bernanrd Gazier:Future Of Work, Employment And Social Protection: The Dynamics Of Change And The ProtectionOf Workers, ILO.

Iam convinced that onlywith every other person inpolitics being female we

will get an equal society. Myexperience from the PES-women in Sweden is thatwhen women first occupiedevery other place on all lists inthe election of 1994 (locally,regional and to theParliament) big steps towardsgender equality were made.

In the European Parliamentthere are only 30 per cent women, so we have a longway to go. I am proud that the Socialists have 40 percent women in their group when the Conservatives

only have 25 per cent women. It makes a difference inevery day decision-making for women, men and chil-dren.

Being a woman in politics you always have to be pres-ent and where the decisions are made. But that is notenough. You always have to wear your gender glassesand think extra about how to support women as agroup but also as individuals. Otherwise women tend tobe forgotten or men are always more important whenit comes to elections or to support someone. Men oftensupport other men. Men have always been better atsupporting one another and also at getting women tosupport them. We, the women, have a lot to learn fromthat support. You always have to remember to appointother women after yourself when you get a new job,advance or are appointed to a new position. Grow bygrowing together with other women.

I am not worried anymore about realising every otherwoman in our European party PES, soon we will bethere. The climate is right and no one can or will stopthat.

In order to be a woman in politics you have to have thelife around you well organised. When we in the Nordiccountries talk about our model we make it possible forwomen to both work and have a family. We need bothday-care centres for children and elderly care for ourgrandparents. Otherwise women cannot work or have

to stay at home to serve lunch to the kids, be homewhen school ends or take care of the elderly genera-tion. But to be a woman in politics you have to liveequal at home and share the daily life and responsibili-ty for children, housework, relatives and friends withyour partner. This knowledge is the background to whysocial democratic women in Sweden worked so hard toget the party to become feministic in the year of 2001.A feminist is someone who recognises that we live in asociety, at work and in family life, where women have arole of minor importance and power. If you recognisethis and want to do something about it you can callyourself a feminist. To get the party not only to changebut also make it give women equal opportunities atwork, in sociality, in family life and also in politics weneeded decisions and changes to the party statutes.Today in some towns, for instance in the city ofStockholm, we have fewer men in top positions thanwomen. So we demand the concept of 'every other'because it has proved to be so successful. At least 40per cent of one of the sexes is a first step but it takesevery other to make a real change.

It is important to use politics as a role model. The nextstep is changing society. And it is only the political sys-tem that can do that. I am thinking about achieving arepresentation level of every other woman also in theprivate sector, on the boards of our banks, enterprisesand the unions. It seems like men are ruling whereverthere is power and money around.

In one field though, we have to solve the problemstogether. This is men's violence against women andchildren. The PES-women and the PES are campaign-ing against sexual slavery accompanying the footballWorld Cup in Germany this summer. Here, the womenin politics can take an initiative, as we have done, butthe results have to come by working together with allcomrades in the party. As long as there is demand forprostitution, women and children will be bought. So wehave to fight the buying with joined forces. Sexual slav-ery can only be solved by national legislation stoppingdemand for prostitution. The same is true for men'sviolence against women and children. Good men haveto be more active in the debate and support solving theproblems for men who try to solve their own problemsby abusing women and children.

I am quite positive that we will push this agenda for-ward quickly since these issues are high up on the polit-ical agenda today. But it will take a lot of hard work forthe party and also for women and men together.

97 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

Women in Politics. Every other the only Way forward by Inger Segelström

MEP Sweden Vice Chair PES Women

It is important to usePolitics as a Role Model

Social democracy benefitswomen. Around theworld women earn less

than men, they own less thanmen, they are less literate, lesseducated, there are fewerwomen than men in profes-sional occupations and highstatus positions, and womenare more subject to physicaland sexual violence in andaround the home than men.Social democracy equalises.

Where social democratic policies are pursued there isgreater equality and this improves the lives of womenas a group on all these measures and more, as has beenclearly demonstrated in the work of Wilkinson andothers. The social democratic welfare state has beendescribed as an instrument for the redistribution ofwealth from men to women.

Since this is the case, you would think that womenwould unequivocally support social democratic politicsboth with their votes and with political activism.Women do vote for parties of the left, but not in pro-portions radically different from those of their malecounterparts. Gender gaps are interesting and variable,and politicians need to take account of them, but theydo not show the vast differences that one might expectif women were, as a group, voting in their class interest.Women do join social democratic political parties anddo run for office, but their party membership is notvery different from that of men, and we see acrossEurope that women run for office and are elected insmaller proportions than men in parties of all persua-sions. Despite such high profile figures as AngelaMerkel and Margaret Thatcher, parties of the left are,for the most part, more hospitable to women thanthose of the right, but the picture is complicated andlittle can be taken for granted.

Here is the question: if social democracy is objectivelymore beneficial for women than most of the alterna-tives, how can its proponents persuade women votersof this? Parties have approached this from two direc-tions: policies and people. The first is a traditional strat-egy: shape policies to serve the interests of the groupswhose votes you seek to attract. The second is newerand more controversial: put up candidates who aremembers of the group whose votes you seek.

Parties fall into three different groups around the issuesof getting more women elected. There are those thattake the issue on and put pro-active measures in place;there are those that recognise a problem and exhorttheir members and officials to get busy, but avoid tak-ing direct action; and there are those that do not con-sider the relative absence of women from elected officea problem. In general, parties of the left make up thefirst and second groups, while parties of the right makeup the third, although the soft right, like theConservative Party in the UK, is wising up, and far rightparties will deploy women as candidates and represen-tatives strategically.

For political feminists and politically ambitious women,the arguments are clear; but how does it look form theother side? Are there clear benefits to social democrat-ic parties from the active promotion of women as can-didates and elected officials? The following discussionwill consider first the numbers and proportions ofwomen in parliaments and parties around Europe. Itwill then rehearse the arguments favouring more equalrepresentation of women and men and the strategiesand mechanisms that have been mobilised in order toachieve this. Finally, it will consider what we hope toachieve by improving the gender balance of electedrepresentatives and whether this serves specificallysocial democratic goals.

Women in Parties and Parliaments in Europe

The proportion of women in the parliaments of OSCEmember countries is 18.5 per cent (19.0 per cent in asingle or lower house; 16.3 per cent in an upper house).However, this diminishes to 16.8 per cent (17.0 per centin a single or lower house; 16.3 per cent in an upperhouse) when the Nordic countries are excluded - notsurprisingly, since Nordic countries occupy four of thefive top spots on the Inter-Parliamentary Union's inter-national table of women's participation. Looking at thecountries of the European Union, the proportion ofwomen elected ranges from 45.3 per cent in Sweden to9.1 per cent in Hungary.

The various countries of the EU tend to elect morewomen to the European Parliament than they do totheir own parliaments. Thus, 57.9 per cent of Sweden'sMEPs are women and 37.5 per cent of those returnedfrom Hungary - although there are exceptions: Finland,for example, returned a slightly smaller proportion offemale MEPS in 2004 than members of its own parlia-ment in 2003. The lowest proportion of female MEPsis to be found among the Poles, only 13 per cent, whileCyprus and Malta did not elect any women to theEuropean Parliament in 2004.

98 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

Women and Social Democratic Politicsby Wendy Stokes

Senior Lecturer in PoliticsLondon Metropolitan University

Parties of the left across Europe tend to return agreater proportion of female representatives to nation-al and local assemblies than do parties of the right. InFrance, where female representation has always beenlow (prior to the implementation of Parity, see below)the highest numbers of women deputies were usuallyfrom the left: in 1986 female deputies made up 9.9 percent of the socialist group elected, whereas the righthad only 3 per cent. The 2002 election, (post Parity)returned 16.3 and 19 per cent female representativesfrom the two main left-wing parties, while the two mainright-wing parties returned 10.4 and 6.8 per cent. InSpain the Socialist Party (PSOE) has consistentlyreturned a higher percentage of women than other par-ties, as has the Labour Party in the UK. The same pat-tern appears to hold in the former communist coun-tries, for example, in Hungary, where politics is male-dominated and masculine in political culture, the left-wing party, MSzP, returned 12.9 per cent, the highestproportion of female MPs, at the 2002 election.

Similarly, when we look at the political groups in theEuropean Parliament there is considerable variation inthe proportion of women members in each, althoughwomen figure far more strongly in the groups to theleft of the political spectrum than in those to the right.In the Green/European Free Alliance Group 47.6 percent of the members are women, the Group of theAlliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe has 41per cent, and the Parliamentary Group of EuropeanSocialists has 38 per cent. By contrast, in the Group ofthe European People's Party (Christian Democrats) andEuropean Democrats 23 per cent of members arewomen, the Union for the Europe of Nations Grouphas 16.8 per cent and the Independence/DemocracyGroup has 9 per cent. An exception appears to be theConfederation Group of European UnitedLeft/Nordic Green Left with 29 per cent women.

The Arguments for More Equal Representation

Does any of this matter except as a rather minority andobsessive pursuit within political science? Arguments infavour of actively promoting the election of womenfall into three categories: equal opportunities, bestvalue, and effective democracy. The first of these is theeasiest to deal with and support. The goal of facilitat-ing equal opportunities is by now deeply embedded inEU policy, and it is widely accepted that simply havinganti-discrimination legislation and regulation is notenough. In addition to the existence of non-discrimina-tory rules and regulations, practices and outcomes haveto be demonstrably non-discriminatory. Accordingly,despite the absence of laws prohibiting the election ofwomen, if we see that very few women are elected wewill, at the very least, suspect that discrimination ofsome sort may have taken place along the way. We shalltherefore be obliged to find ways to achieve moreequality of opportunity.

Equality of opportunity relates to the second argumentgiven above: best value. With elected representatives, aswith any other important occupation, we want to makesure that the most able people are in post; this might betermed getting the best value from them. If our repre-sentatives are not drawn from the widest possible con-stituency - if groups of people do not take part in theselection process - we may suspect that we are not get-ting the best possible representatives and representa-tion.

The third argument is the most contentious: effectivedemocracy. This suggests that our representative bodyshould include people from across the range of differ-ences in the community. Further, it argues that if itdoes not, if representatives are drawn from a narrowsection of the community and the parliament does notinclude people from significant groups, the representa-tive legitimacy of the parliament is undermined. Withregard to women, this argument has been developedalong the lines of a politics of presence by AnnePhillips and others adopting her model. This contendsthat women's presence among elected representatives isimportant because women as women have differentexperiences and perspectives from men. These experi-ences and perspectives, which men are less likely tohave access to, are important for political policy anddecision-making.

Thus, the project to increase the number of womenelected can be pursued from two quite different per-spectives. Stripping political systems of all forms ofdiscrimination and opening them up to politically ambi-tious and able women is an equal opportunities pro-gramme that does not necessarily have any other ideo-logical content; when opening the political agenda towomen's experiences and perspectives is added, this isa feminist programme.

Equality Strategies and Mechanisms

It is usually argued that while cultural and socio-eco-nomic explanations of women's relative absence fromelected office (and of differences between countries)are intuitively appealing, political variables are in factthe most significant. There is some correlation betweenreligion, the date at which women got the vote, thepresence of women in professional occupations andthe proportion of women in a parliament (MercedesMateo Diaz summarises the research on this).However, the strongest correlation is with the electoralsystem. Generally, proportional representation andmulti-member constituency systems return morewomen than do first-past-the-post and single memberconstituency systems. In addition, many (but not all) ofthe countries with high proportions of elected womenoperate some sort of quota system.

Some 75 countries internationally operate, or haveoperated, electoral quotas for women; in twelve ofthese the quota is of parliamentary seats that are set

99 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

aside for women; in a further 25 there is a statutoryquota. Among countries of the European Union onlyFrance and Belgium use a statutory quota while partiesin a number of EU countries have voluntarily usedquotas. These include parties in Finland, Germany, theNetherlands, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Italy the UK andLuxemburg. According to Norris,

By 2000, among 76 relevant European parties (with at least tenmembers in the lower house), almost half (35 parties) use genderquotas, and two dozen of these have achieved levels of femalerepresentation in the lower house of parliament over 24 per cent.Among the European parties using gender quotas, on average onethird (33 per cent) of their elected representatives were women. Bycontrast, in European parties without gender quotas, only 18 percent of their members of parliament were women. (Pippa Norris,2004)

Quotas may be mandatory or voluntary and may beused at party or parliamentary level. They are more eas-ily introduced in a PR system, where manipulating posi-tions on a party list can be used. In EU countries quo-tas are mostly at party level, and more often voluntarythan mandatory. Broadly left-wing parties are morelikely to use quota systems than conservative parties,and tend to include more women as representativeseven without having a quota. In Europe, parties of theleft started to introduce quotas in the 1980s. Theseincluded Green, Social Democrat, Communist,Socialist and Labour parties.

Quotas are often associated with the Nordic countries,but this is to make the mistake of generalising from theexample of Norway, which is probably the paradigm ofquota use: only one party in Sweden has a quota andDanish parties ceased to use them in 1996. The rela-tively high numbers of women elected in all the Nordiccountries appears to be due to political culture andactivism as much as quotas, for example, the Swedishprinciple of Varannan Damernas, ‘Every Other Sea aWomen's Seat’ that has been in operation since the1980s.

In the UK, the Labour party has managed to circum-vent the apparent conservatism of the first-past-the-post, single member constituency system by usingwomen-only short lists in a proportion of key con-stituencies, in addition to making use of the additional-member provision in elections to the new regionalassemblies. Enabling legislation was passed in 2002. In1999 France took the unique step of legislating for sex-parity in party candidacies; this has proved problematicso far with parties apparently struggling to find enoughcandidates, and some parties preferring to pay thepenalty for not meeting the parity requirement.Nonetheless, the percentage of women elected hasincreased.

In a few countries women's parties have been createdto counter exclusion. These tend to appear where thepromises of equality have not been met and/or wherethere are traditions of separate women's organisations.

The Women's Coalition of Northern Ireland (WNIC)seems to be a response to the resolute exclusion ofwomen and women's issues from a political system thatprioritises equality between religious groups. Women'sparties in former soviet republics and other formerlycommunist countries seem to be both a response toexclusion, and the continuation of a tradition of sepa-rate women's organisations. The creation of a women'sparty in Greece is a rather different affair, since thisappears to be a party promoting the support ofwomen's traditional social roles.

Will Improving the Gender Balance Make PartiesMore Appealing?

Improving the balance of men and women in electedoffice has become a goal of both women's organisa-tions and political parties. While women's organisationsare driven by a range of motivations, including thepolitical ambitions of members, social justice, democ-racy and feminist principles, it is probably fair to saythat political parties are most strongly driven by theurge to win votes. Of course, individual party mem-bers, activists and representatives may want to get morewomen into office for any number of reasons, but aparty as an institution is focused on gaining power viavotes.

Political parties, initially of the left, but increasinglyfrom across the political spectrum, are paying attentionto women's votes. When women were first included inthe franchise there was considerable concern aboutwhat they would do with their votes. The parties of theleft that supported the vote for women from the per-spective of democratic justice, were worried thatwomen would use their votes in support of conserva-tive parties. Parties of the right that did not in generalsupport women's enfranchisement rather expected tobenefit from it. In the event, it turned out that womenplaced their votes in much the same way as men of thesame demographic, although the belief that women aremore conservative than men has persisted.

The thesis that women are more conservative than menwhen it comes to voting has been carefully unpicked bypolitical scientists over recent years. The picture thathas emerged is complex and illuminating about the vot-ing behaviour of both men and women. By and large,men and women of the same demographic vote simi-larly. However, differences do appear that are quite spe-cific to, on the one hand, time and place, and, on theother, to the age and socio-economic position of vot-ers. What was referred to as ‘gender gap’ when itbecame apparent that women in the USA were votingfor the Democratic Party in larger proportions thanmen, is in fact a very complex phenomenon. From herextensive data analysis Pippa Norris claimed in 1996that there was, ‘considerable variation cross-nationallyin the gender gap, with women more right-wing thanmen in Britain, Australia, Luxemburg and Italy, whilewomen are more left-wing in Germany, Spain,

100 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

Portugal, and the USA’. She concluded, ‘The resultssuggest that the conventional wisdom about women'sgreater conservatism across Europe is no longer valid.’(Norris, 1996). By 2003 Inglehart and Norris were find-ing further consolidation of this trend in WesternEurope and concluded that women held more ‘left-leaning’ values that men in most countries (Inglehartand Norris, 2003).

So, research suggests that the voting behaviour of menand women will be similarly shaped by events and poli-cies much of the time, but may be affected differentlyon occasion. For example, De Vaus and McAllisterfound that women were more opposed to war, the useof force, nuclear energy, and nuclear weapons thanmen, and were more likely to support welfare pro-grammes and environmentalism, and Inglehart andNorris refer to differences in ‘value orientations’ partic-ularly with regard to ‘post-materialism, the role of gov-ernment, and gender equality’. Whatever may have hap-pened in the past, conservative parties today cannotrely on any difference being to their advantage amongfemale voters any more than parties of the left can relyon having the edge with men: at one point in the UKyoung men were more likely to vote conservatively thanyoung women.

There is a growing assumption that having morewomen as candidates and elected representatives makesa party more appealing to women - and possibly tosome men. This assumption exists in an uneasy balancewith worries about whether people are prepared to votefor a woman. Women's preference for voting forwomen is a frequently repeated credo. Repeated at leastas often is the claim that, contrary to the belief thatwomen favour voting for women, they in fact are resist-ant to voting for women. Neither contention appears tohave much basis in empirical research, however, somefindings from the USA in 1997 suggested that femalevoters might prefer female candidates. There is a fur-ther suggestion that American women not only voteDemocrat in slightly higher numbers than men, they doso in greater numbers when the candidate is a woman -and in some recorded instances the vote reversed whenthe Republican candidate was a woman.

Similar results emerged from research into the 2001general election in the UK:

The presence of women as representatives increases women’sactivism. In seats where a woman MP was elected in 2001women's turnout was 4 per cent higher than men's. Women werealso less interested in the election campaign and less likely to saythat they would volunteer to work for a candidate or party inseats with a male MP. Women were far more likely to agree that'government benefits people like me' in constituencies with afemale MP (49 per cent compared to 38 per cent). Where a manrepresented the seat, this gap reversed. (Electoral Commission,2004)

Nonetheless, getting good data on voting disaggregat-ed by sex is a tricky task - for the very good reason that

it is close to impossible to separate out the results of asecret ballot! Asking people how they would prefer tovote is unreliable, although exit polls can include thesex of the voter. What we do know, thanks to recentresearch, is that people as a whole are not much both-ered by the sex of a candidate, and that in certain cir-cumstances female candidates benefit.

There is some research that shows bias against womencandidates to be a factor in voting preference - forexample that undertaken by Fox and Smith who com-pared college students in Wyoming and California. It isnot accidental that much of the research cited so far isfrom the USA. In American politics individual candi-dates have a far higher profile than they do in Europe,where party dominates candidacy and policy at elec-tions, so in the US individual characteristics, includingsex, loom larger than they do elsewhere.

The introduction of women-only short-lists by theLabour Party in the UK in 1997 offered an opportuni-ty for looking at voter responses to female candidates.From their research into this election Studlar andMcAllister conclude that: ‘voters did not discriminateto any extent between men and women candidates’,further, ‘within the Labour party, candidates fromwomen-only shortlists did substantially better inattracting votes than their male counterparts’.

Would Improving the Gender Balance BenefitSocial Democracy?

Beyond the claim that the election of women in moreor less equal numbers with men is democratically desir-able, is the suggestion that women's equal participationin politics will generate policies that benefit women. Afurther suggestion is that

a critical mass of women in political institutions would also initi-ate change in broader policies of development and internationalrelations - for example, by developing policies of peace and non-violent conflict resolution, access to and protection of the fullbody of human right, sustainable and socially just developmentand placing people above profits and […] would transform thevery nature of power and the practice of politics through the val-ues of cooperation and collaboration […] that women would playpolitics differently and practise power accountably. (SrilathaBatliwala, 2006)

This is the most difficult argument of the many aroundwomen's political participation both to defend in theabstract and to demonstrate from research. As anabstract argument it runs the risk of descending intosex essentialism and claims that women are essentiallysomething while men are essentially something else,rather than making the less controversial claim that asoutsiders with different sorts of experiences from theinsiders, women might bring different insights andhabits to the political arena - if given a chance to do so.

The values described above are clearly social democrat-

101 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

ic, even if social democratic parties have rather lostsight of them.Research by the Inter-Parliamentary Union found that89 per cent of the female representatives surveyed,from sixty-five countries, believed that they had a spe-cial responsibility to represent women's needs andinterests. Research in the UK, the Nordic Countries,and the USA found similar responses from electedwomen. Looking at what people do, rather than whatthey say they want to do, there is some evidence thatwomen in office do support such policies a little morethan their male equivalents, and that increased numbersof elected women leads to the adoption of policiesmore beneficial to women. Barbara Burrell's research inthe US Congress, Manon Tremblay's in the CanadianParliament, and the work of Marian Sawer on theAustralian Senate all found that female representativeswere more likely to raise issues of particular relevanceto women than man were.

There is also some research that suggests that electedwomen are slightly more inclined to support more gen-eral liberal issues than their male counterparts. Forexample, looking at the US Congress, Barbara Burrellfound that as early as the 1960s, more female represen-tatives in the USA supported the Civil Rights Act andthe Equal Rights Amendment that their male counter-parts. Moreover, in terms of voting patterns, she foundthat Democrat women were the most liberal group andRepublican men the least.

Conclusion

To conclude, social democracy objectively benefitswomen as a group by countering gendered differencesin interests. These include gendered differences inwages, opportunities and family life as well as concernsabout the environment and military conflict. Socialdemocratic politics does this through egalitarian, envi-ronmental and welfare legislation and provision.Women respond to this by voting for social democrat-ic parties in slightly higher proportions than men.There is a growing interest in enhancing that tendencyby making parties appearance more women-friendly viathe inclusion of more elected women alongside menwho espouse feminist policies. Some research and a lotof rather unsubstantiated (but appealing) rhetoric onthe part of both politicians and prominent women sup-port this. A further consideration derives from theassertion that women in office will encourage the cre-ation of women-friendly policies and a way of doingpolitics that is more appealing to women. Again, thereis some research that supports this, but not much sincethe presence of women is a new and still growing phe-nomenon and therefore hard to test. If this is the casethen a virtuous circle is formed: the election of morewomen leads to better policies that attract more womenvoters. It is a tenuous contention at present, but itwould seem that there is nothing to be lost from getting

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References

Batliwala, Srilatha (2006): Women Transforming Power?, www.opendemocracy.net, 6th October.

Bergqvist, Christina et al (1999): Equal Democracies? Gender and Politics in the Nordic Countries,Scandinavian University Press, Oslo.

Bird, Karen (2003): “Who are the Women? Where are the Women? And What Difference Can they Make? Effects of Gender Parity in French Municipal Elections”, in: French Politics, 1: 5-38.

Burrell, Barbara (1994): A Woman’s Place in the House, Ann Arbor.

Childs, Sarah (2004): New Labour’s Women MPs: Women Representing Women, Routledge.

De Vaus, D. and I. McAllister (1989): “The Changing Politics of Women: Gender and Political Alignment in 11Nations”, in: European Journal of Political Research, 241-262.

Electoral Commission (2004): Gender and Political Participation, London, Electoral Commission.

Ford, L. E. (2002): Women and Politics: the Pursuit of Equality, Houghton Mifflin.

Fox, Richard L. and Eric A. N. Smith (1998): “The Role of Candidate Sex in Voter Decision-Making”, in:Political Psychology, Vol. 19(2), 1998: 405-419.

Galligan, Yvonne and Manon Tremblay eds (2005): Sharing Power: Women, Parliament, Democracy, Ashgate.

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Inglehart, R., and P. Norris (2003): Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World,Cambridge University Press.

Mateo Diaz, Mercedes (2005): Representing Women: Female Legislators in West European Parliaments,ECPR.

Norris, Pippa (1996): “Mobilising the Women’s Vote: The Gender-Generation Gap in Voting Behaviour”, in:Parliamentary Affairs, 49 (2), 333-342.

Norris, Pippa (2004): Building Political Parties, IDEA.

Phillips, Anne (1995): The Politics of Presence, Oxford University Press.

Selzer R. A., J. Newman and M. V. Leighton (1997): Sex as a Political Variable, Lynne Reiner.

Sineau Mariette (2005): France, in: Yvonne Galligan and Manon Tremblay eds: Sharing Power: Women,Parliament, Democracy, Ashgate.

Studlar, D. T. and I. McAllister (1998): “Candidate Gender and Voting in the 1997 British General Election:Did Labour Quotas Matter?”, in: Journal of Legislative Studies, 4(3): 72-91, 81.

Tremblay, Manon (2003): “Women’s Representational Role in Australia and Canada: The Impact of Political Context”, in: Australian Journal of Political Science, 38 (2), 215-38.

Wilkinson, Richard G. (2005): The Impact of Inequality, Routledge, London, 2005.

For those who aremindful not of thepast but of the

future of Europe, old andoutdated issues, nowa-days, much more ideolog-ical than real, should notbe a matter of furtherconcern. The duelbetween the Europeanfederalists and the strenu-ous opponents of theEuropean Superstate hasnothing to do with the

challenges ahead of us. More and more the EuropeanUnion is taking the shape of what I call the hermaph-rodite of the new times. In other words the shape ofthose organisations that have been blurring the borderbetween international agencies and constitutional onesby adopting the organisational patterns of both. Suchhermaphrodite responds to the needs and the demandsof the globalised world, by definition a world wherenot just states, but also individual persons are activesupranational actors. For reasons due to our peculiarhistory, our Union happens to be the frontrunner ofthese new patterns. And in this context it has to beread, not in the context and with the eyes of the past.Since its early years, Europe has always been marked bythis double nature. Even though conceived as an inter-national organisation, as such creating rights and obli-gations of the undersigning member states, it was giventhe power to adopt regulations directly affecting indi-vidual citizens. And already in the early 1960's theEuropean Court of Justice read the clauses of theTreaty as the sources of individual rights on the basisof which citizens could challenge actions or omissionsof their nation states. The mixed nature of Europe wastherefore visible even in these initial features.It became more and more so with the direct election ofthe European Parliament, which had previously beenan assembly of representatives of our national parlia-ments, only empowered to give its advice to the minis-ters of the member states, sitting in council and decid-ing upon the binding acts of the Community. Oncedirectly elected, the European Parliament had the same

expectations as the national parliaments with which itshared the same democratic legitimacy. On the one sideit gradually passed from advice to co-decision in thelegislative process. On the other side it more and morelooked at the Commission as the 'executive', politicallyresponsible towards Parliament itself. At that point theCommission became a hybrid institution, for it retainedits original nature as a technical agency at the service ofthe member states, but it also became that kind of'executive' subject to a (political) vote of confidence ofthe Parliament both to initiate its activity and to remainin power.I could quote several other aspects of the EuropeanCommunity that offer further evidence of it being acontinuous hybridisation of principles of internation-al and constitutional law: the primacy of communitylaw, which is based on the Treaty, but also on the con-stitutions (or on the parliamentary acts) of our nation-al legal systems; or the discipline of the 'own resources',that despite their being 'own' are decided upon not onlyby the Council, but separately by our member states,which 'ratify' the acts of the Council (as if they wereinternational agreements). However, it is in the devel-opments which occurred after Maastricht that the her-maphroditic nature of our common architecturebecame mostly evident. In Maastricht the decision wastaken that new missions should be jointly pursued byour member states, missions that were even more polit-ical than those directly connected with market integra-

tion (the main aim of the Community): a common for-eign and security policy, judicial and police cooperation,a widening of the so called 'social Europe', the coordi-nation of our economic policies mostly (but not neces-sarily) in connection with the creation of the Euro.Later on, with the Lisbon agenda, also improving ouroverall competitiveness (and therefore education,research, industrial innovation, …) was included amongthe European missions. During the negotiations thatled to the Maastricht treaty, the crucial question wasraised of how to deal with the new missions: by trans-

104 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

The Future of Europeby Giuliano Amato

Former Italian Prime Minister, Senior Vice Presidentof the PES and Vice-Chairman of the European

Convention

The European Union is taking the Shape of what Icall the Hermaphrodite of

the New Times

ferring new and further regulatory competences to theEuropean Community (according to the Communitymethod), or by keeping such competences at thenational level and by using the European level only tocoordinate their exercise (according to the intergovern-mental - cooperative method)?The decision was not to transfer competences and todevelop, instead, sophisticated instruments (commonindicators, benchmarks, peer review, recommendationsto the states) without any binding force and exclusivelyand entirely 'cooperative'. Upon this background a newcooperative Europe has grown up in parallel to thecommunitarian one, but also with bridges and overlaps,generally suggested by the issues to be tackled. In for-eign and security policy political declarations of theCouncil have been supported through the use ofCommunity instruments, namely economic sanctionstowards third states, while in the field of immigrationsome of the cooperative missions have become com-munitarian (in other words, instead of coordinatingtheir national competences, our member states havepassed them onto the Community). Due also to thesebridges and overlaps, the overall construction hasturned out as hermaphroditic and the proposal of adouble hatted Foreign Minister (exercising the func-tions both of the High Representative of our CommonForeign and Security Policy and of the member of theCommission in charge of the Community’s externalrelationships) is an eloquent image of it.One might argue that this is much more a monster thana hermaphrodite, that hermaphrodites themselves can-not go very far and it would be much better for us togo back to the purity of the old models, eventuallymaking our choice: a European international organisa-tion, a European federation or a European Superstate.But here comes my point. In our times there is nothingexceptional nor anomalous in having a hermaphroditicorganisation, for it responds to the needs and the pat-terns of a globalised world where the border betweeninternal and international matters is not so clear cut orcontinuous as it used to be. Europe has to be rightlyconsidered the front runner in adopting these new pat-terns, but it is not the only organisation of states whichhas a legal reach going beyond the states themselvesand directly affecting their citizens. International tri-bunals are another, though very circumscribed, exam-ple. And also organisations such as the WTO and theILO, due to their actual developments, can be quoted asmembers of this expanding club.It is a club already under the attention of several per-ceptive scholars, who are identifying the members ofthe club, and mostly Europe, as the prototypes of thegovernance of the future; a new governance - theyargue - based not on hierarchy but on cooperation, noton command but on dialogue, not on mutual exclusive-ness but on mutual tolerance and understanding.Perhaps they go too far when they idealise these newpatterns as a sort of paradise on earth (I am thinking ofthe European Dream of Jeremy Rifkin, who has, how-ever, domestic American reasons for being so biasedand benevolent towards Europe). In any event they areright when they point at our European architecture as a

model of multilevel governance substantially relying onnetworking and using binding instruments only whenneeded to give the net the necessary strength.Being so, there is no reason for us to go back to the olddebates (and therefore to the fight among the puremodels of the past). On the contrary, what we shoulddo it is to pragmatically discuss how to make our net-work efficient. Europe has multilevel governance basedon networking, but once we have discovered it there isno reason for us to fall in love with it as it is, for itsometimes works, some other times it does not. Itdepends and it is our own responsibility to introducethe necessary corrections when it does not. Nor do Isee any difference in tackling this issue between aBritish and a continental European, for being British, Isuppose, means not being ideologically in love with net-working, but assessing obstacles and hindrances thatmight prevent our network from giving us a satisfacto-ry level of delivery.The European way to define the balance that is neededis expressed by our motto, ‘united in diversity’. Howmuch unity is needed vis à vis the diversities we want topreserve? How many of our diversities deserve to bepreserved and how useful our unity can be in eliminat-ing our unworthy diversities? In principle, not necessar-ily the level and the instruments of unity will remainthe same if we widen the range of diversities to be pre-served or we decide to eliminate some of them. Andpragmatism, not ideology, is needed to cope with theseissues.Do we think that a European foreign policy is neededin a future world where the US and China would other-wise be the only global actors and the UK, France andGermany would become secondary and gregariousactors? If our answer is positive, we should convinceour member states to increase the level of unity in thisarea and to correspondingly reduce national diversities.Do we think that religious, cultural and ethnic diversi-ties should be at the core of our common richness andthat none of them should prevail over the others? Ifour answer is positive, we should ask Europe just topreserve them, without going beyond the equal safe-guard of equal rights for all. Do we think that socialdifferences throughout Europe corrode the loyalty to itand therefore are not compatible with the positiveimage it needs among its own citizens? If our answer ispositive, we should equip Europe with some essentialinstruments allowing it to promote the reduction ofsuch differences in our national contexts.And here I can finish, for the scope of my essay isaccomplished. Looking at the future of Europe meansbeing fine tuned firstly with the real nature of our com-mon construction and secondly with the challengesahead of us that can be more effectively and efficientlyfaced by using and improving the first. I am aware thatI have limited myself to this preliminary work of finetuning. But from here we can more safely go towards abetter and more convincingly supported future.

105 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

Europe has plungedinto a crisis ofmeaning in the

wake of the repudiationof the EU Constitution byvoters in France and theNetherlands. At the rootof the crisis is a deepangst over the dire state ofdomestic and Europeaneconomic affairs. Theneo-conservatives arguethat the only way out ofthe current economic

malaise facing Europe is to deconstruct decades of socialentitlements, benefits, and programs that have come to defi-ne the European notion of quality of life in a sociallyresponsible society, and unfetter the market place so thatcompetition can run free. If Europe does this, say the neo-conservatives, the economy will grow and the people willprosper.The socialists argue, on the other hand, that the unrestrainedAnglo-American liberal market model, with its emphasis onwinner-take-all, rewards the rich at the expense of beggaringthe working class and results in a meaner and more bereftsocial order.In a curious way, what is really on trial in the recent consti-tutional fray in Europe is not the EU Constitution, but, rat-her, the future of capitalism itself, not only in Europe, butthroughout the rest of the world. An increasing number ofEuropeans are asking themselves whether the liberal marketmodel or the social market economy model is the bestapproach to charting the economic future.The unfolding events of the past weeks remind me ofevents that occurred just twenty years ago when RussianPremier Mikhail Gorbachev, responding to grassroots dis-content across the Soviet Union and the satellite countries ofEastern and Central Europe, initiated his famousPerestroika.Mr. Gorbachev hoped that Perestroika would stimulate asoul-searching re-evaluation of the shortcomings and failu-res of communism. His intent was to save the vision ofsocialism by reforming the toxic practices that had made amockery of Marxist ideology from the very beginning of theSoviet experiment. His reforms came too late for a mori-

bund system, and the entire communist house collapsed.On the 20th anniversary of Perestroika, former RussianPremier Mikhail Gorbachev, hosted the World PoliticalForum in Turin, Italy. The event brought together currentand former world leaders for a kind of celebration and post-mortem. Mr. Gorbachev asked me to deliver a keynoteaddress on the state of Europe and the world two decadesafter launching the famous reform initiative which signaledthe beginning of the downfall of communism in Russia andCentral and Eastern Europe. Here is what I said…‘With the fall of the Berlin wall and the death of the USSR,capitalism has enjoyed an unchallenged global playing fieldto impose its will on the world.’ I suggested that ‘perhaps itwas now time for the capitalist camp to engage in the samekind of internal soul-searching debate about the world it hasshaped and molded in the interim years.’ The reality is grim.Today, while corporate profits are soaring around the world,eighty-nine countries find themselves worse off economical-ly than they were in the early 1990s. Capitalism promisedthat globalisation would narrow the gap between rich andpoor. Instead, the divide has only widened. The three hun-dred fifty-six richest families on the planet enjoy a combinedwealth that now exceeds the annual income of forty per centof the human race. The three richest families, Bill Gates,Warren Buffet, and the Waltons of the Walmart retail storechain enjoy a combined wealth that exceeds the annual inco-me of the 940 million poorest people living on earth.Capitalist ideologues promised to connect the unconnected,bringing the world’s poor into the high-tech global village.The promise has not been kept. Two-thirds of the humanrace has still never made a single phone call and one-third ofthe human race has no access to electricity, leaving themmarginalised and isolated in global commerce and trade.The champions of capitalism pledged to promote sustaina-ble economic development and to conserve and preservethe fragile biosphere upon which all life on Earth depends.Yet, we continue to squander our remaining fossil fuel reser-ves, spewing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into theatmosphere, destroying the world’s ecosystems and habitats,threatening the survival of our fellow creatures, and addingto the worrisome threat of global warming and the prospectof catastrophic climate change in the coming century.We were told that globalisation, under the watchful eyes ofcapitalist markets, would create a more stable and peacefulworld. Instead, terrorism is on the rise, travel has becomemore dangerous, and the world has become less secure.Our business leaders decried the deep corruption that per-meated the old centralised communist regimes, while manyengaged in equally egregious corporate corruption, bringingdown some of the world’s ‘most trusted’ companies, sendingCEOs and senior executives to prison.

106 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

The real underlying Debate inEurope is not the EU Constitution

but, rather, the Future of Capitalismby Jeremy Rifkin

Director of the Foundation on Economic Trends (FOET)Washington, D.C.

Author of ‘The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision ofthe Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream’

Neo-conservatives attacked the centralised power exercisedat the top of giant state-run communist bureaucracies onlyto see them replaced by equally centralised power concentra-ted at the top of 500 or so global corporations who now rulemuch of the world.Why have the two dominant ideologies of the Industrial Ageso utterly failed? Because the central tenet of each was notsufficiently tempered by the antidote of the other, to createthe appropriate checks and balances necessary to make amore livable world for everybody. The central tenet of com-munism is best expressed in the oft-heard aphorism ‘fromeach according to his ability, to each according to his need.’A noble principle, to be sure. In practice, however, commu-nism stifled personal incentive and created a form of pater-nalistic governance that robbed the individual of any sem-blance of autonomy, making everyone a virtual ward of anall-powerful state. In the end, no one was held personallyresponsible for their individual fate and everyone was sub-ject to the dictates of impersonal state-run bureaucracies.On the other hand, the central tenet of capitalism is foundin the words of the Scottish Enlightenment economist,Adam Smith. In ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes ofthe Wealth of Nations’, Smithwrites:‘Every individual is continual-ly exerting himself to find outthe most advantageousemployment for whatevercapital he can command. It ishis own advantage, indeed,and not that of society whichhe has in view. But the study of his own advantage natural-ly, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employmentwhich is most advantageous to the society.’Smith believed that an invisible hand ruled over the marketplace, guaranteeing that everyone would eventually benefit,if only the market mechanism were left unencumbered.Neo-conservative economists and politicians still believethis.In reality, the invisible hand has turned out to be invisible infact. Left to its own internal logic, the unfettered marketleads not to a bigger share of the economic pie for all, but,rather a ‘winner take all’ end game. How else do we accountfor the fact that America’s unbridled market model has resul-ted in a dramatic widening of the gap between rich andpoor, in direct proportion to the loosening up of externalcontrols over its commercial practices. Today, Americancorporate profits are at near record highs, productivity gainsare unprecedented, and yet, the U.S. has sank to 24th amongthe industrialised nations of the world in income disparity -that is, the gap between the small number of very rich fami-lies at the top and the millions of working poor families atthe bottom. Only Mexico and Russia rank lower.Meanwhile, America, which practices the purest form ofmarket capitalism of any country in the world, enjoys thenegative distinction of having the most severe poverty ofany of the advanced industrialised nations. One out of fourAmerican children are currently living below the povertyline. The U.S. also sports the highest crime rate in the indu-strialised world. Indeed, twenty-five percent of all the pri-soners in the world are currently incarcerated in the U.S.Two percent of the adult male workforce in America is

behind prison bars.Is capitalism salvageable? Yes, but only if we are willing tohave a frank and open discussion about what capitalism doeswell and what it does poorly. The strength of capitalism is,paradoxically, also its weakness. The market caters to thepursuit of individual self-interest, and is, therefore, almostpathologically innovative. Individual risk-taking, the entre-preneurial spirit, technological innovation, and productivityadvances exceed any other economic system ever devised.This point, I believe, is generally agreed to by all.But then, the more troubling question has to be asked, whatdoes capitalism not do well? It does not fairly distribute thefruits of economic progress. That is because the logic in theboardroom is to always cut production costs in order tomaximise profits and shareholder value. This means redu-cing, whenever possible, the share of the gains that go toworkers, as well as cutting the expense of preserving thenatural environment upon which all future economic activi-ty depends. The result is a world increasingly divided bet-ween haves and have-nots and a biosphere seriously weake-ned at the hands of self-interest devoid of a sense of collec-tive responsibility.

What is the answer? In a glo-bally connected world, wherewe are all increasingly vulnera-ble to the behavior of othersand equally dependent on eachother’s good will if we are tosurvive, the hope for humanityrests on creating anAristotelian balance that

encourages and stimulates the entrepreneurial spirit of themarket, while simultaneously tempering its inherent propen-sity to run wild and concentrate more and more power at thetop of global corporate pyramids. Countervailing forces, inthe form of a strong trade union movement, a diverse andhealthy civil society, and engaged and vigilant political par-ties need to continually reign in the potential abuses andexploitation of capitalist practices, by ensuring a just redis-tribution of the benefits of the market with the appropriatesocial programs and adequate social net, without, however,stifling market incentives. This is, indeed, a tricky balancingact. Ironically, as it turns out, rather than being at odds, weought to consider capitalism and socialism as complementa-ry ‘visible hands’ that continually balance individual self-interest in the market with a collective sense of responsibili-ty for each other’s welfare in society. If individual materialself-interest is not tempered with a sense of social responsi-bility, society risks narcissistic fragmentation and the exploi-tation of the many by the few. If a sense of collectiveresponsibility does not make room for individual self-inte-rest, we lose personal accountability and risk a reign ofpaternalistic terror at the hands of an all-powerful state.The social market economy model practiced across themember states of the European Union comes closest to the‘visible hand’ mechanism I have described. Unfortunately,the current economic debate in Europe threatens to polari-se public opinion to the extremes – pitting unrestrained mar-ket forces against the bureaucratic dictates of a welfare state.The difficult task at hand is pursuing an intelligent andsophisticated course that maintains a balanced tension bet-ween the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism and the social

107 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

The Strength of Capitalismis, paradoxically, also its

Weakness

solidarity of socialism without either vision vanquishing thespirit of the other. We are, after all, each and every one ofus, an embodiment of both spirits. We desire to pursue ourown self-interests while mindful of our responsibilities to

our fellow human beings. A reformed European social eco-nomy that allows both aspects of human behavior to flourish is a model for the rest of the world to follow.

108 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

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In 1945, in the wake of the disasters of fascismand national socialism, it was certainly a wisedecision that Europe, or some European states,

resolved to agree on a common political goal, whichconsisted in the resolution not to wage war ever again,and to replace this most horrific of wars with peacefulcoexistence and cooperation. I emphasise this fact,because I have the impression that, sometimes, theobjectives of the European project become blurred,considering that the main goal was to end war and tobuild peace in Europe. Economic interests and eco-nomic cooperation have never been more than instru-ments in achieving and maintaining peace in Europe.They never were the true objective of the integrationprocess. Actually the approach was much more com-prehensive, since the conclusion drawn from the terri-ble war experience was to make prosperity as well associal and personal welfare of the people living on ourcontinent the principal goal. This has, to this day,remained the core objective of European integration,and I believe that when shaping European policies andEuropean institutions we should keep this core objec-tive in mind.

For quite some time, I had the impression that theEuropean Union had come to understand that the lib-eralisation of markets and trade alone would not suf-fice to reach the goal of bringing prosperity to as manypeople in Europe as possible. As a consequence, socialand employment policies figured more prominently onthe European agenda, especially in the second half ofthe 1990s, and with Austria as a notable lobbyist. Onemight say that this change of mind found its mostwidely known expression in the adoption of the Lisbongoals. However, in the past couple of years, the Lisbonprocess has got bogged down, and the mid-term reviewrevealed that in many respects we are currently furtheraway from reaching the set objectives than we were atsome earlier point in time.

As the effective implementation of social andemployment policies in Europe was slowing down, oras a consequence thereof, the European Union’s polit-ical decision-making capacity went into serious crisiswhich manifests itself in different areas. There are thewell-known frictions over the question of which posi-

tion to take on the Iraq war; there were widely diverg-ing views in the Constitutional Convention on thefuture institutional development of Europe; there isdisagreement on the deepening of the EU; and appar-ently there is no common ground when it comes todefining the policy priorities in setting Europe’s medi-um-term course.

Against this background the rising popularity ofpolitical groups whose main interest is the removal oftrade barriers and who have little or no interest in theEuropean Union playing a major role in shaping thefuture of Europe, is hardly surprising.

I believe that the development we have witnessed inrecent years, which has been marked by restricted polit-ical decision-making capacity coupled with the dis-placement of social and employment policies as well aswith a displacement of the specific continental-European economic and social model, has been thesource of the severe social crisis we are currently facingin Europe. Luckily this crisis does not manifest itself asexplosively throughout Europe as it did during theyouth riots in the banlieus of Paris, in the autumn of2005. However, it is uncontested that Europe is facinga social crisis. And all those who interpret the events inthe suburbs of Paris first and foremost from a securityor crime perspective, should ask themselves the follow-ing question: does anyone believe that these riots wouldhave taken place, if all of those young people had jobs?

I believe that anyone asking this question will sooncome to the conclusion that at the core of this overallcrisis there is a social crisis as well as a crisis of theeconomy, which offers a growing number of individu-als an ever decreasing range of life perspectives andhopes. I therefore believe that a firm commitment to aneconomic and social model which, in contrast to a rad-ically neo-liberal model, offers a reasonable balancebetween competition and solidarity, must be put at thetop of the social democratic political agenda. This hasbecome a question of survival also for political integra-tion, and we must, therefore, bring about a change inthe social and economic conditions in Europe.

Jürgen Habermas made a wise statement, when hesaid that governments that pursue interventionistrather than neo-liberal policies can only realise theirvisions of a prosperous European society if they areable to rely on a healthy European Union, capable ofspeaking with one voice at the international level. Inother words, it will be much easier to resolve the socialcrisis Europe is currently facing, given the economicconditions prevailing at the international level, ifEurope is highly integrated rather than restricted to thepresent dimensions of the Single European Market.Thus strengthened, Europe would be the response torather than the expression of globalisation. Nowadaysmany people get the impression that events at large,that is to say globalisation on an international scale, willinevitably hit Europe like acts of God, with one-dimensional consequences, and that current EuropeanUnion policies provide no answers to globalisation. If

109 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

Present and Future of the European Union

by Alfred GusenbauerLeader of the Austrian Social Democratic Party SPÖ

we can agree that Europe is not supposed to be anexpression of globalisation, but a tentative response toit, the subsequent consensus might be the starting pointfor a common strategy of social democratic or centre-left parties in Europe.

Incidentally, these ideas are not limited to socialdemocratic thinking. The Christian Democratic PrimeMinister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Junker, forexample, repeatedly stated that workers’ interestsdeserve greater consideration in the European Union,and that Europe is not the Europe of Ministers ofFinance and bankers, the Europe of bureaucrats andforeign ministers. Europe must also be a Europe of thepeople, people who have a right to feel at home on thiscontinent, because they can enjoy the benefits of asocial model which corresponds to their aspirationsand views of a good life.

In the given context I consider this the most crucialissue. The European model is unthinkable without asocial dimension. Vladimir Špidla, the EUCommissioner for Employment, Social Affairs, andEqual Opportunities, expressed this thought very accu-rately when he said: ‘The European social model isbased on a set of common values. These values areshared among all member states. Among these funda-mental values are the commitment to democracy, therejection of all forms of discrimination, universalaccess to education, accessible and good quality healthcare, gender equality, solidarity and equity, the recogni-tion of the role of the social partners, and of social dia-logue. These values are constitutive for Europe. Inother words, Europe ends where these values are notshared.’ To my mind, this is an excellent description ofthe constitutive character of the social dimension forboth European identity and the European civilisationmodel. Consequently, the purpose of European inte-gration is to remove frictions, not only as regards inter-state conflicts, which in the past gave rise to wars, butalso when it comes to remedying the gap between richand poor, between those who are accepted and respect-ed in their communities, and those who are excluded,between those who have a share in economic progressand those who have not.

I am of the opinion that the admission of theCentral and Eastern European countries to theEuropean Union has taken us a big stride forwardtowards this goal, since the historical interstate demar-cation lines have been overcome. However, this doesnot relieve us from the task to work on the implemen-tation of policies designed to overcome the demarca-tion lines dividing the societies of our day. Still, weneed to ask ourselves whether, subsequent to this his-toric enlargement by the Central and Eastern Europeancountries, continued high-speed enlargement may notimpair the European Union’s decision-making capacitywhen it comes to intrastate conflicts. To put it frankly,I am less concerned about potential member states ful-filling the admission criteria, than about the absorptioncapacity of the Union itself. Currently we experiencehow, even under prevailing conditions, it is extremelydifficult to reach agreement on the funding of EU poli-cies, and how the principle of solidarity – a fundamen-tal principle of Community action – is quite obviouslytwisted and abused by individual member states in ahighly selfish manner. Solidarity depends on reciproci-

ty; it applies to everyone, also to the new memberstates, and does not permit any kind of discounts. Norcan I personally understand, how it can be justified thatnew member states benefiting from the principle ofsolidarity and availing themselves of European funds,just like older member states that face structural diffi-culties, use these benefits to finance tax and in particu-lar profit tax dumping, which puts the overall financingof the European welfare state at risk.

I believe that prevailing conditions call for a funda-mental re-definition of the concept of solidarity, whichneeds to be made fairer. To maintain currently claimedand exercised entitlements holds the danger that newchallenges will not be addressed, that special interestsare shored up and that the integration project will fallvictim to them.

Even before the failure of the referenda in Franceand the Netherlands, I felt that the European Unionwas in trouble. Signs of crisis had been noticeable forquite some time. Europe needs to enter into a dialoguewith its citizens, especially on one key issue: how canthe population tangibly benefit from European integra-tion in their daily lives? Personally, I believe that thepeople of Europe cannot be blamed for being dissatis-fied with current results of European political decision-making. In the light of weak growth rates, persistentlyhigh unemployment rates, the growing gap betweenrich and poor, they cannot be blamed for questioningthe purpose served by Europe? While it is our obliga-tion to highlight the European Union’s role in main-taining peace, I feel that this argument alone is nolonger sufficient in ascertaining people’s loyalty to theEuropean project.

This is why I would consider it perfectly reasonableas well as at the time to address this dissatisfaction withthe present state of Europe, which is being articulatedby citizens all around Europe. Such confrontation withpeople’s concerns will inevitably lead to the question ofwhat should be the nature of policy change in Europe?What needs to be done differently in order to increasethe practical benefits people can draw from Unionmembership?

I believe that practical benefits will increase, once wesucceed in effectively combating unemployment inEurope, which might be achieved to a limited extent atthe national level, but would certainly be more success-ful, if agreed at the international level. If Austria decid-ed today to implement an expansive economic policy,the situation would be improved, though part of theup-beat effects would evaporate, unless at least ourneighbouring countries, or the countries in theEurozone, adopted a similar or the same economic pol-icy. This implies that, apart from the many tasks to beperformed at the national level, effectively combatingunemployment is a key task of the European Union, ifthe European project is to be taken forward in the bestinterests of Europe’s citizens.

Another thing: one may disagree with some of TonyBlair’s policies; however, I agree with him when he saysthat traditional agricultural subsidies which – and I amsaying that within parentheses – first and foremost ben-efit large agricultural enterprises rather than small andorganic farmers, are too high and that a Europe which

110 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

looks to the future and intends to present a response toglobalisation must be a Europe that invests much moreinto science, research and universities. Taking thisstance as a starting point, he concludes that theEuropean Union’s traditional agricultural subsidiesmust decrease in favour of increased spending on sci-ence and research. I believe that this approach is muchbetter suited to meet the challenges currently faced byEurope than the preservation of vested interests.

Tony Blair is right when he says: ‘If we want oureconomy to meet the future challenges, at some pointwe have got to make sure that the budget is alignedwith the economic priorities of our citizens, of ourbusinesses, and of our workforce.’

Consequently it would have been necessary to re-align Europe’s political priorities also in the context ofthe negotiations on the Community budget. It is a pitythat these negotiations ended in a lukewarm compro-mise, with policy and expenditure structures being pre-served up to the year 2013. The vague declaration ofintent to evaluate the budget development again in2008 does not really help. In fact, the same, misguidedbudgetary policy has been prolonged until the year2013. This means to perpetuate excessive funding ofagricultural structures, which, inter alia, causes largeswathes of land in Europe to become wasteland andruins farmers in developing countries, thus runningcounter to any kind of solidarity-based developmentapproach. This will be the consequence of zero changeup to 2013. I think it would have been wiser to go onnegotiating and haggling than to perpetuate misguidedpolicies for years to come. No extra money for researchand development until the year 2013 clearly disadvan-tages a Europe that competes for knowledge, competesfor the best brains, competes in the development ofgoods and services that prove successful on the worldmarket. I believe that Europe needs to set new priori-ties, focussing on research and development, on pro-moting growth and infrastructure, better coordinationof tax policies, and - a particularly pressing issue – onaligning migration policies.

Hans Rauscher, a renowned Austrian columnist,very accurately analysed the dilemma we are facingtoday: a cheap, low-skilled workforce is being luredfrom different parts of the world, to perform hard,dirty and dangerous jobs for little pay - Mr. Rauschercalls this type of work ‘donkeywork’. Meanwhile, how-ever, there is not enough of this type of work available.As a result, the young, mostly second-generation immi-grants, are out of ‘donkeywork’, for which their parentshad been originally hired, and as a result suffer from aparticular type of disorientation and hopelessness.

There is only one possible response to this situation,namely to invest enormous amounts into establishingan educational system that provides equal opportunitiesfor all students. The member states in the centre ofEurope, most notably Austria and Germany, need topoint the finger of blame at themselves, since theireducational systems are designed to perpetuate ethnicand social differences. An educational system thatserves integration and overcomes differences of ethnicand social origin, will be much better suited to providelife perspectives to migrants and their children. Toreform our educational systems to this effect seems to

be a key task when it comes to tackling the existingchallenges.

Europe is having a hard time because its mecha-nisms of legitimisation are immensely complex. Whatam I trying to say? Anybody dissatisfied with Austriandomestic policies will not right away question the legit-imacy of the Austrian nation, but rather come to themore logical conclusion that the malperforming admin-istration will have to be replaced at the next elections.It is different with Europe. If people are, for variousreasons, dissatisfied with European policies, they tendto question the European Union’s very right of exis-tence, for the simple reason that its mechanism of legit-imisation is different. There is no such thing as aningrained European identity. Europe needs to justify itsright of existence ever anew, through political decision-making and performance. The European Union is thusexposed to much higher pressure to perform than itsmember states. The absence of adequate mechanismsfor getting rid of unloved politicians, adds to the prob-lem. In a nation state, it is easy. There are elections tothe national parliament and the unpopular governmentis voted out of power and replaced with another one,which is given the opportunity to prove its superiority.But how to vote someone out of power at Europeanlevel, considering the complex system of institutions –Parliament, Council, Commission – and the fact thatmost citizens have no idea what their powers to decideon which issues are? As an ordinary citizen I simply donot have the power to vote those responsible out ofpower. Such power, however, is a fundamental precon-dition of democracy: it is the requirement that thosesubjected to standards, i.e. the citizens, may choose torid themselves of their rulers. This is the differencebetween democracies and non-democratic systems ofgovernment. Of course there are other differences, butthe core difference is: how do I get rid of my rulers? Atthe European Union level people see no way of votingthose whose policies they disapprove of out of power,not even with a differently composed EuropeanParliament, which would naturally make a difference.

This is why I have for quite some time been of theopinion that, if we wish to strengthen Europe, we musthave direct elections of the agents of government. Oneoption would be for the president of the EUCommission to be determined by the result of the elec-tions to the European Parliament. Another optionwould be the direct election of a European President,even if it does not correspond to the constitutional tra-dition of the majority of member states. So, there arevarious options, but to my mind we must inevitablymove in this direction, if we wish to make the interplaybetween government and opposition, between satisfac-tion and dissatisfaction visible to European citizens. Ithink this would be important and therefore regret thatthe draft Constitution has, so far, failed to be adopted,as it would have brought considerable improvement,especially in the given context. Also as regards therights of the European Parliament, the Constitutionwould have marked considerable progress. There is adanger that in the event of the European Constitutionnot being adopted, any further democratisation of theUnion will be seriously delayed, adding to the above-discussed problem rather than rectifying it.

111 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

It must also be pointed out that political parties, asmajor actors in democratic systems at least at nationallevel, have to this day failed to establish properEuropean structures, comparable to the structures atnational level. I am not excluding the European socialdemocratic parties from this criticism. We still havemore of an association or federation of differentnational parties than a European Social DemocraticParty, and the same is true for other political groups.

I do believe that without establishing political par-ties at the European level, there will never be sufficientpublic awareness in and of Europe, and there willnever be that badly needed European political space,without which the above-outlined objectives of inte-gration cannot be reached.

So we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. Onthe one hand, the citizens of Europe have high expec-tations of Europe, on the other hand, there is little will-ingness to provide the European Union with the toolsit needs to achieve these goals. Frequently, petty inter-est-driven disputes arise, which are not only harmful toEuropean creativity, European visions and theEuropean Dream, but what is much worse, are in manyinstances harmful to the best interests of the Europeanpopulation.

I am in favour of implementing all measures that arefeasible in the absence of a consensus on a great visionfor Europe. I am in favour of doing what is feasibleand serves the prosperity and wellbeing of theEuropean people. I agree with Timothy Garton Ash, atruly eminent expert on European affairs, who wrote inThe Guardian at the end of October 2005: ‘Europeshould be like a great experimental laboratory, withcountries constantly looking over each others’ shoul-ders and stealing each others’ best ideas. We agree onthe goals, higher growth and productivity, more inno-vation, less unemployment, reduced poverty. We don’tneed to get there by the same route.’ I find that this isa pragmatic approach to tackling some of the mostpressing social and economic issues in Europe, andthereby regain sufficient momentum, so that peoplewill not think of Europe in sceptical terms only, andthat our vision of deeper integration may be eventual-ly realised.

This text is an updated version of A. Gusenbauer’skeynote address at the opening of the conference ‘The EU, a

Global Player?’ organised by the Forum ‘Scholars forEuropean Social Democracy’ in Vienna, November 2005

112 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

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For years now, manyFrench men and womenhave felt that Europe,

which had succeeded in brin-ging about peace on a Europeancontinent that had been woun-ded by wars and authoritarianregimes, no longer protectsthem.

Our citizens have an increasingfeeling that Europe is even a

threat to their daily lives, in view of some facts such aspersistent unemployment, lay-offs for financial reasons,delocalisation, etc. These fears were voiced more force-fully during the campaign for the referendum on theEuropean Constitution. Without going back to thiscampaign, it is unfortunately quite obvious thatEurope's political crisis and stagnation have worsenedsince the French 'No' and that no other alternative hasbeen put forward by those who so vigorously hadattacked the draft Constitution.

The feeling that Europe no longer protects us is alsoincreased by the fact that public services in France arebeing questioned: post offices close down in smallmunicipalities, 'unprofitable' railway lines are closed,and gas and electricity as public services are under pres-sure. There is a general lack of understanding of theideological brainwashing coming from Brussels, andmore precisely from the Commission, that seems to saythat the only solution to all our problems is competiti-on between all our sectors of activity!

In a context in which those legitimate fears are beingused in a demagogic way, it is difficult to reassure thepopulation as long as there is no sign of a true politicalwill to defend public services.

The Constitution provided an indisputable legal basisfor the drafting of a framework directive on services ofgeneral economic interest. However, without aConstitution, it is still possible to move forward. In arecent meeting of the Party of European Socialists(PES) in Brussels, we discussed the possible architectu-re of this future directive. This is an unhoped-for stepforward, which would have been thought impossiblenot so long ago.

If this text was adopted, it would be a major politicalevent for Europe, because it deals with the core of ourwillingness to live together and would show a new poli-tical will. It could become a new guideline for a socialEurope with:

- a fair distribution between community action and the principle of subsidiarity,

- true tools in order to guarantee greater equalityin education, health, culture, social protection and the access to essential services such as water, electricity, gas and telecommunications.

In a globalised and liberal environment, which putsworkers and regions in competition to one another, it isindispensable that Europe has the tools to better safe-guard the general interest, beyond economic profits.Such a text is also legally necessary because of themany 'grey areas' between purely commercial interestsand the general interest.

In the beginning, the idea of a framework directive onpublic services came mainly from France. But after afew months, the discussion in the Party of EuropeanSocialists (PES) allowed us to find a consensus on theneed to have such a directive and on its main principles.

What is it about? It is about asserting that you cannotonly count on the action of market forces to fightagainst exclusion, and reinforce economic, social andterritorial cohesion.

What would be the object of the directive? To guaran-tee that there is a foundation of regulations related topublic services (or services of general interest, to usethe more common terminology in Europe).Of course, the concrete definition, planning, organisa-tion and financing of services of general interest mustremain the responsibility of the member states. Thedirective would aim at guaranteeing common principlessuch as their universality, continuity, quality, equalaccess, and consumer protection. Information, consul-tation and the participation of workers' representativesand stakeholders from the 'tertiary sector' would alsobe prerequisites for a successful modernisation of theEuropean social model.

Something we need to follow up… with great attenti-on.

113 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

A Framework Directive on Services ofGeneral Economic Interest:

A Step towards a renewed Social Europe?By Jean-Louis Bianco

French MP and former Social Minister

The defeat of the referen-dum on the Constitutionin France and in the

Netherlands may have surprisedsome, but since it is unlikely thatthe Constitution would havebeen approved in Britain,Denmark, or Sweden and sincea constitution must be endorsedby all, it was doomed from thestart.

Napoleon once said that constitutions should be short andobscure. The aborted Euro-Constitution passed half theNapoleonic test. It was obscure, but it was also far too long.Ambiguity is a double-edged sword. It can unite those whowant to be united and find something positive in the text -and divide those determined to unearth a negative verdict.

This is what happened with the proposed constitution. InFrance and the Netherlands it united a disparate majority forwhom the constitution was either unimportant or undesira-ble. If unimportant the vote could be use for other purpo-ses – such as protesting against one’s government. If unde-sirable, there could be no loss in voting against it. Some wan-ted a more social Europe than what was on offer; otherswanted to keep Turkish workers or Polish plumbers out;others wanted to warn their national leaders; and otherswere afraid of ceding more powers to what they regard as anunaccountable bureaucracy.

Did people want an ever closer Union? Probably not. Didpeople want an even more ‘market-oriented’ Europe?Probably not. Do people want a ‘social’ Europe, certainlyyes - and unsurprisingly so since no-one wants lower pensi-ons, expensive health care, long working hours, and lack ofprovisions for young families.

Yet there is no denying that the driving ethos of theConstitution was ‘market’ Europe rather than ‘social’Europe. Like all such documents the Constitution was, ine-vitably, a compromise. But the compromise reflected a poli-tical reality, a determinate balance of forces and the balance,today, shows social Europe on the defensive and marketEurope on the advance.

The winning idea, expressed by virtually all conservativesand also by many (perhaps a majority) of those of the Leftis that the main impediments to economic progress inEurope are labour market rigidities and excessive social pro-visions and that de-regulation and privatisation, withinlimits, widen opportunities and resolve problems.

Thus the neo-liberal view is firmly at the centre of econo-mic discourse. It is the central global narrative of our age. Inone form or other it is at the centre of political debates inChina (under the ruling Communist Party) whose growthrates are astonishing (and worrying) the world. It is at thecentre of politics in Brazil too where the President, LuizInacio Lula da Silva, leader of the Workers’ Party, Lula,initiated a pension reform bill cutting benefits for retiringpublic sector workers and raised the retirement age amidstthe plaudits of the IMF which approved a new $14.8 billionloan for Brazil. Not everyone is a paid up member of theglobal neo-liberal belief, there is some feeble resistance inLondon, Paris and Berlin, but no-one can ignore it. It setsthe agenda forcing its opponents on the defensive.

There are variants of this discourse. The parties of the Leftare less enthusiastic about demolishing social Europe anddeny that this may be inevitable. They seek to find a half-way– I hesitate to say ‘a Third Way’ since this expression is nolonger heralded with the fanfare of yesterday - between out-right resistance to the constraints of globalisation and asupine attitude towards it. The parties of the Right are awarethat it is difficult to win elections by undertaking to wipe outthe social gains of the last fifty years. Hence the relative con-vergence between left and right.

There is nothing new about such convergence. It has beenpart of West European history since 1945. The difference isthat the agenda in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – full employ-ment and the welfare state - was far closer to the aspirationsof the Left.

The debacle on the European Constitution provides anopportunity to re-examine what might constitute Europeanidentity. But first it is necessary to be clear about at least onething: European identity, just like German identity or Frenchor British, is not something that is intrinsically good. It is eit-her something which already exists and one is born into. Orit is something one constructs for a particular purpose.Either way is, inevitably, a changing and artificial concept.Identity is no indication of behaviour.

The difficulties facing social Europe are central to the pro-blem of constituting a European identity. Even thougheveryone is reluctant to face it, identities are established –not exclusively but also - against other alternatives. ‘TheOther’ is a necessary requirement for the formation of iden-tities. It does not follow that ‘the Other’ must be wiped out,gassed out, cleansed out or locked up. One can perfectly welltolerate ‘the Other’ or even be pleased of its existence. Butone cannot be a Muslim, or a German, or a Jew unless oneis aware that, in so being, one distinguishes oneself fromnon-Muslims, non-Germans or non-Jews.

114 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

Social Europe and European Identityby Donald Sassoon

Professor of Comparative European HistoryQueen Mary

University of London

Photo: Caroline Forbes

Thus identities do not have only a positive sign, they mustalso contain a negation. Feeling ‘European’, whatever that is(and there is no agreement) necessarily includes an aware-ness of difference. The problem is that European identity isweak compared to national or regional identity. There aresome good reasons for it. A commitment to a Europeanidentity bears the stigma of past feelings of superiority, ofracism, of carrying a mission civilisatrice or the ‘white man’sburden’. Historically Europe is not just the continent of theDeclaration of the Rights of Man. It is also the continent ofcolonialism, the slave trade, Auschwitz and the Gulag. Tokeep the good bits and reject the embarrassing ones wouldsend us back to the ideological building of nation-states.

European identity cannot be constructed without postula-ting a difference with other models. And who is to be ‘theOther’, for Europeans? The xenophobic parties have alrea-dy chosen the ‘clash of civilisations’ model. They are onstrong ground. The Islamic world is an easy target: tornasunder by its own divisions, faced by a wave of extremism,and weakened by a chronic inability to formulate a frame-work for the coexistence of religious commitment and secu-larism, it lacks universalistappeal.

In 2002 Robert Kagan sugge-sted a new ‘mission civilisatri-ce’ for Europeans, contrastingthe general European ‘indi-rect’ approach to so-called‘rogue’ states, moving from confrontation to rapproche-ment, beginning with cooperation in the economic sphere— and then moving on to peaceful integration (see www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html ). This wasan extension of the tired notion of Europeans being fromVenus and Americans from Mars – a sound-bite turned intoa book; but it contains a grain of truth, namely that whatEurope does is to distinguish itself from America; it showsa different way; it has a different mission.

Given the power of the United States as a positive model,above all the image of modernity it has offered for so long,it is difficult to imagine a stronger European identity beingbuilt without a clear demarcation made between Europe andthe United States. I am not suggesting that anti-Americanism is the necessary and inevitable basis for thedevelopment of a European identity. In an interdependentworld anti-Americanism serves no purpose whatsoever. Butone can be different without being antagonistic. The pricethat a hegemonic country pays – such as the USA - for beinghegemonic is that it constitutes both a model and an anti-model.

What would be the basis for a non-American Europeanidentity?

It cannot be found in military and power politics competiti-on. The military gap is evident to all and need not detain ushere. The European Union has sought to establish a com-mon position on foreign policy and at times it has even suc-ceeded, notably over the former Yugoslavia (the Kosovowar) – but this was not a distinctive position since it suppor-

ted an American initiative which was undertaken under theaegis of NATO and not the United Nations, that is underthat politico-military organisation that links the UnitedStates with Europe.

In matters such as the Middle East and notably the Israel -Palestine issue, there is a common European position, butthis is barely articulated and quite ineffectual. The relativeequidistance between Israeli and Palestinian aspirationsmaintained by the European Union has no significant effecton Israel – who enjoys the near unconditional support ofthe United States - and is of minimal comfort to thePalestinians.

The Iraq war constituted a particularly dramatic instance ofthe difficulty of establishing a common European position.The two countries which are regarded as the central axis ofEuropean integration, France and Germany, failed to aggre-gate the majority of European countries, even though opini-on polls regularly demonstrated that a majority or a signifi-cant minority of European public opinion was against thewar. Besides, eventually, all of Europe recognised and accep-

ted, through the UnitedNations, the legitimacy andnecessity of US presence inIraq. Those who were againstthe war were not necessarilyagainst the occupation: therehave been no massive protestsand demonstrations in Europe

against the presence of coalition troops in Iraq.

The majority of European states supported the USA. Someremained neutral and few signalled their disagreement.Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, was quite rightwhen he provocatively listed the members of the Europeancoalition which supported Washington. This included, manymembers of ‘old’ Europe (i.e. Western Europe): Denmark,Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Great Britain, Portugal, andSpain as well as those he quaintly called ‘new’ Europe, virtu-ally the whole of what was the communist bloc: Albania,Bosnia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary,and Moldova.

When it comes to the main issues in international affairsthere is no single European voice, there is no EuropeanVenus to counterpoise to the American Mars. The onlyeffective opponent to the American occupation of Iraq havebeen the largely Sunni-based local resistance. Europeans eit-her despair (Blair and co.), or gloat (Chirac and co.). There isno European position, no European initiative, no Europeansolution. No-one turns to Europe for advice. Internationalaffairs offer few elements for the construction of aEuropean identity.

What of culture? There are, after all, plenty of EU program-mes aimed at favouring a common culture; there areexchange programmes, funding for research. Europeans are‘proud’ of their culture, but when they think of Europeanculture, they think of national cultures. In any caseEuropeans do not consume ‘European’ culture. They consu-

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There is no EuropeanVenus to counterpoiseto the American Mars

me their home-made national culture and they consumeAmerican culture. The High Culture of the past is largelyEuropean, but what of the culture of today? Take popularmusic. Each country prefers their own songs… andAmerican songs (and the odd British ones). Thus in Italy inthe best-selling albums of 2002 there were by four Italianartists (Vasco Rossi, Ligabue, Celentano, and Giorgia) therest were British or American: Queen, U2 (The Best Of1990-2000), and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers (By The Way).In April 2005 the best selling single in Finland was ‘TaivasIyo Tulta’ by Terasbetoni; in Hungary it was ‘Elment az enRozsam’ by Balkan Fanatik; in Italy it was ‘I bambini fannooh’ by Povia; and in France it was ‘Un Monde Parfait’ byIlona Metrecey. Everyone seems to like their home-grownsingers, but hardly anyone else does. French songs do notmake it in Hungary, German songs are unheard of in Spain.The Europe of popular songs is united by the sound ofAmerican music.

If one takes books or films, the story is the same. A fewFrench or Italian films are seen in the rest of Europe but itis the Americans who speak to the Europeans while theFrench speak to the French,the Germans to the Germansand the Italians to the Italians.There is, of course, nothingintrinsically wrong with this –except that the goal of a com-mon European culture rece-des constantly from the hori-zon.

The one country every European national knows better thanall the others is the USA. Films, novels, songs contribute tothis. But the media too play their parts. Elections inEuropean countries are barely covered by the media in theothers, though the French and the British get some attenti-on. American elections, on the other hand, are systematical-ly examined, discussed, dissected, and commented. Suchdegree of attention is largely justified: who is the Presidentof the USA matters more to most of us, and for obviousreasons, than who is the Prime Minister of any other EUmember countries.

We are on stronger grounds when we look at social Europein its wider sense. What is ‘social’ in the European nation-states and makes them different from the other two mainmodels of advanced capitalism – the United States andJapan - are relatively strong trade unions and social-demo-cratic parties; but their powers and ambitions have beenmuch reduced. Besides much of this social Europe is ancho-red to the nation state – by far the main source of identity.The European Union is not seen and cannot be seen as thefoundation of social Europe. On the contrary it is seen asembracing the market above the social.

That the dominant ethos should be market-oriented cannotsurprise any observer of the history of European integrati-on. Its driving force has always been the abolition of intra-economic barriers and the creation of a single market with asingle currency. Welfare legislation has always remainedsolidly in the hands of nation states. And so has taxation, the

main instrument of economic decision making and welfareprovisions.

There are, of course, important ‘social’ elements in today’sEuropean Union. These have had the positive function ofenabling many of the social democratic left to accept inte-gration and give up their narrow and futile vision of buildingsocialism or rather, as one should say today, social capitalismin one country.

The social elements of the Union, however, were alwaysmeant to be functional to competition. Their purpose was toestablish a level-playing field inside the European markets,reducing the worst forms of social dumping such as theequalisation of the length of the working day or ensuring aminimum wage (though not the same throughout theUnion).

The electorates of states with advanced welfare states do notwish (and how could we blame them?) to reduce social pro-visions. Their health care arrangements are better than thosein the United States and so are their levels of environmental

protection. However, thecountries with limited welfarestates – this includes most ofthe new members - know thattheir unique competitiveadvantage lies in low wages,low taxes and low social provi-sions. They are forced intopolicies of further tax cuts andmore privatisation. Social ine-

qualities between the different member states thus remain aconstitutive part of the European Union.

One day, it is said, when the economic gap between themore advanced countries and the laggard will have narro-wed, and only then, there can be a more balanced socialEurope. Which means there is little that is social now in theEuropean Union.

There is plenty of the ‘social’ in Europe but this is to befound in each of the member states, especially the oldermember states. It rests within the domain of national poli-tics. It strengthens Swedish identity or Danish or French orGerman. It does little for European identity. Thus socialEurope is on the defensive while Europe remains divided bylanguages, political institutions, and culture. One would needto build up and develop social Europe, make it into a modelfor the rest of the world. But the Left is desperate to recastitself anew. It does not wish to extend the model. It seeks tomodernise it and, right now, modernisation still meansAmericanisation.

For most commentators the rejection of the constitution(and, may I add, the ease with which this rejection, the big-gest defeat for the cause of European integration in fiftyyears, was digested) was the clear signal that Europeans lak-ked a ‘European identity’. ‘European Identity’ – like manynebulous concepts whose meaning is almost impossible todefine - are warm, comforting words. Most people can beEuropean and something else. Only a few strident nationa-

116 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

Social Inequalities between the different Member States remain a

constitutive Part of the European Union

lists fear European identity. And we all know where national-ism has taken Europe: mass murder, genocide, conquest,oppression. So European identity suggests a process whereEurope turns its back on the bad old days and looks towardsa future of peaceful coexistence between peoples who main-tain their languages, and the more pleasing aspects of theirnational identity. In this paradise yet to come, Italians do notcontribute black-shirted thugs who beat up their opponentsor mafiosi, but Dante and Giorgio Armani. Poles forgetwhat the Russians or the Germans did to them and learn tolove their neighbours just as Jesus, whom many of themworship, told them to do. The British stop being arrogantand do something about transforming their drunken hooli-gans into respectful and sober tourists able to applaud withequanimity the football prowess of their opponents.Yet the fact remain that the nearest model we have for thedeliberate construction of a common identity is the nationa-list model.

Can one construct a European identity? Should one con-struct it? What would it entail? The only model we have forthis is the construction of national identity. This takes usback to the nineteenth centu-ry, when history, then barelyestablished in the academy,was becoming important. Theromantic revolution had re-centred it as the master narra-tive where the people couldread their own biography.Heroes could still be Kings and Queens but only becausethey represented the ‘genius’ of one’s nation. Historians, forcenturies the lackeys of sovereigns, the chroniclers of lies,now acquired a ‘democratic’ role and, with this, an importantmarket. The British historians of the nineteenth century pre-sented a rosy and entirely comforting view of the develop-ment of British history. It was the history of a succession ofintelligent reforms based on pragmatism. Even Cromwelland the little unpleasantness which befell Charles I’s headwere drafted in a story of constant progress towards greaterdemocracy and rights. An enlightened ruling class gave in topopular pressure just at the right time, before the masses tur-ned to violent revolution. Unlike the rebellious French, theconfused but well-meaning Italians, the militaristicGermans, the hopelessly romantic Poles, the British dideverything right. The cliché still dominates the British viewof themselves and has been successfully exported.

In France too history was used as the pre-eminent terrainwhere national identity could be forged. A people who didnot know its own history, it was believed, would always be atthe mercy of despots by whom they would be hoodwinkedand cheated. The people had to be told the truth aboutthemselves. This was the task of historians, the new priestsof the secular order. On 18 May 1846, the French historianMichelet, reflecting on the kind of books the people shouldbe offered, wrote in his diary: ‘What is needed for the mas-ses?’ The popular book par excellence, he concluded, unsur-prisingly for a historian, was a history text that would tell thehistory of France and, above all the history of theRevolution. Two years later, in the midst of the revolutionwhich briefly re-established the Republic, Michelet wrote to

his friend, the song writer Béranger, that, as the masses didnot read, it was imperative that the Republic organisedpublic reading of its bulletins, produced posters with easy-to-read characters with illustrations, and that patriotic songsshould be sold by peddlers. In his 1848 valedictory lectureMichelet declared that the only way historians could speak tothe people was by telling them their history, what they hadachieved and what they could achieve.

What is a common European experience? A mythology ofprogress and civilising mission (ignoring the heavy borro-wing from the Orient, above all from China, India and theMiddle East) is one. Another is a bloody history of warfareand genocide. One could stress the positive and tone downthe negative, but, fortunately, this is unlikely. Having conque-red their professional freedom, historians are not likely totailor their lessons and their books to the requirements of ‘acommon European identity.’ This is not to say that it wouldnot be a good thing if Europeans had a greater feeling ofbelonging together and sharing a common destiny – particu-larly as it happens to be true that the dissolution of theEuropean Union would be a political and economic cata-

strophe. Indeed all the docu-ments of the European Unionare careful to add, wheneverthey mention the need formore coherence and identity toavoid fragmentation, chaos andconflict and to help achievecohesion, solidarity, subsidiari-

ty, concertation and cooperation, that it is also necessary torespect the existing national identities of the member states.Every minor ‘cultural’ proposal, such as that of providingaccess to European Union Institution Libraries (1995)claims that it is an important contribution to fostering thespirit of European cohesion and identity and that it willstrengthen the sense of a common European identityamongst all the citizens of the Union.

I do not think a European identity can be taught. I do notthink that one can make Europe a nation state of the nationstates – which is not to say the slow and painful constructi-on of the European Union is not the best thing that has everhappen in European history. What should be taught, andcertainly taught more, is the history of other Europeancountries. But let us not forget that most people’s idea ofhistory is not based purely on what they were taught atschools and university. They learn their history partly fromthe distorted recollections of parents and grandparents,partly from the inchoate references to the past they gleanfrom broadcast news, partly from newspapers, partly frombooks (above all from novels), and, above all, from televisi-on and films.

Right now the typical history taught in schools in most ofEurope consists of a fundamental pillar: the history of one’sown country. To this pillar is added a smattering of Greekand Roman history, allegedly our common heritage – a noti-on invented in previous centuries, some major events (BlackDeath, French Revolution), some major landmarks such asthe Renaissance and the Enlightenment (usually heavily gea-red to one’s own country). The first half of the twentieth

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What should be taughtis the History of otherEuropean Countries

century is present with the two world wars. The second halfis almost absent.

The peoples of the European nation states had not chosentheir nation. They have had nationhood and nation-buildingthrust upon them. Eventually they became British, German,French, Italian, and Belgian. They may have felt Scottish orCornish; Gascon or Bretons, Bavarians or Prussian orAustrian, Sicilian or Piedmontese. And many still do, but,eventually, thanks to a bureaucracy and an education systemwhich gave them a common language, states which gavethem common institutions, and thanks to wars, national ant-hems, sporting tournaments, Eurovision song contests,national broadcasting, and a host of other initiatives,Europeans have learned to identify with a particular set ofpolitical institutions we call ‘nations’.

The European Union lacks such mechanisms and few wouldwant the EU to have them. Weshall not build European identitythe way French or British orGerman identity was built. Butwhile it is true that the nation-state is still the main focus ofidentity for Europeans, it isequally true that European elec-torates are angry with their poli-ticians. They vote, increasingly,for ‘anti-system’ parties of theright. And they abstain morethan ever before. At the 2005elections in Britain Tony Blairwon, for the third time, a parlia-mentary majority which wouldmake most of his European col-leagues green with envy, but theactual votes he obtained, 35.2 percent were the lowest ever in thepost-war history of the LabourParty and, since only sixty percent of the electorate vote, onecould argue that he is the leastpopular Prime Minister in post-war history, helped by the factthat the conservative oppositionwas even more unpopular thanhe was. But the situation is notmuch better in other countries.In Germany the CDU/CSUobtained 35.2 per cent and the SPD a little less, but at leastthe turnout (77.7 per cent) was better than the British. InPortugal the turnout was 65 per cent, far lower than the firstdemocratic elections in 1975 when the turnout was 91 percent. In the former communist countries, elections no lon-ger attract a clear majority of the citizenry. In Poland only40.57 per cent of voters bothered to vote. In most Europeancountries few parties get more than 30 per cent. Everywhereelse and for a number of years, various right-wing nationa-list and xenophobic parties have obtained between one-fifthand one-third of the vote.

The situation is even more worrying when we look at parti-cipation in the elections to the European Parliament. Herethe distance between electorates and European institutionsis abysmal. It is not just that few people vote, but that, at theelection to the EP of 2004 fewer people than ever voted(voting is compulsory in Belgium, Cyprus and Luxembourg):In theory, and here is the paradox, one might have expectedEuropeans – disappointed with national politics - to look tothe European Union for guidance and leadership, but theiranger against their political class turned into oppositionagainst the pan-European project of their national leaders.

But why are so many angry or, at the very least, disappoin-ted? Europeans have never been richer. They have neverexperienced such a long period of prosperity and of peace.Of course many are unemployed, but unemployment (atmost ten per cent) can hardly be a major cause for the disaf-fection of so many. Britain, in spite of its relatively low level

of unemployment, shows alower level of political parti-cipation than elsewhere.

The European Union isseen as an irrelevancy, a sideissue or, for some, as anobstacle. Perhaps it is notsurprising that theEuropean project has failedto conquer the hearts andminds of so many: to beco-me central to political lifethe European Union wouldneed far more powers thanit possesses at present. Butto acquire more power itneeds the backing ofEuropeans. It needs to con-quer hearts and minds. Andthis is the vicious circle - themain impasse - in which theUnion finds itself.

First ‘Europe’ was anopportunity to make peacebetween Germans andFrench. This is still regardedas the finest achievement ofthe European Union. As theyears go by this is less and

less credible in the sense that it is less and less credible thatthe Federal Republic of Germany and France would havegone to war again had it not been for the EuropeanCommunity.

Then ‘Europe’ became an economic zone, the CommonMarket. An identity was established. Being in Europe meantbeing on the side of economic prosperity. This is the visionof Europe that worked. This is what convinced the British(just) that they should be in rather than out. This is whatconvinced the Danes (because the British were in) and theIrish (for the same reasons).

118 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

By the 1980s much of the Left (and eventually even theBritish Left) had rallied round Europe. This was partlybecause the socialism in one country model which they allsubscribed to had become untenable.

The EU has grown in size with successive waves of accessi-ons. There was the accession of countries formerly underright-wing authoritarian rule but with market economies:Greece (1981), Spain and Portugal (1986). These continuedto prosper and in the case of Spain spectacularly so. WhenAustria, Finland and Sweden joined in 1995, the EU was stilla rich countries club. Norway and Switzerland chose to stayout. When Communism fell, it was impossible to keep anyo-ne out, but the social model was more difficult to defend, inpart because the new members were rapidly jettisoning theirown social model (constructed under communism).

At this stage one could have opted for deepening or wide-ning. The slogan of the 1990s was both deepening and wide-ning. This proved unrealistic. The European Union was rightto welcome the ten new countries in 2004 (Cyprus, the

Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta,Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia). And Bulgaria and Romaniawill follow soon. But for this enlargement to succeed itwould have been necessary to give far greater powers to thecentre than the citizens of ‘old’ Europe were prepared toconcede.Why is that?

Because the existing rhetoric of elections has becomeincreasingly centred on taxation, education, health, law andorder and jobs and these are still overwhelmingly nationalissues. Nor can these be turned into pan-European issues. Itwould involve an accelerated transfer of power of the cen-tre – and this is something the electorates do not want. Theconstruction of a common identity, above and beyondvague declarations to pollsters of the kind of ‘I feelEuropean’ will remain firmly ensconced in the land ofdreams and not in that of reality – at least as long as everyo-ne, the Left included, will continue to subscribe to the ideathat devolution and decentralisation is always good.

119 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

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The search for a European socialmodel, less optimistic now thanit was a year ago, can neverthe-

less be seen as a rapprochement bet-ween economic and social integrationafter the decades of neoliberal deregu-lation, market integration and socialfragmentation. The Lisbon strategy,

full of compromise and conflict as it is, expressed the ambi-tion of giving the social sphere a key role for the process ofmodernisation, and stressed that economic dynamism can-not be reached without a more coherent interplay betweeneconomic and social policy. Social policy, in the Lisbon agen-da, is defined as a productive factor, as a prerequisite formaking Europe the most competitive market economy by2010 by investing in people, making work pay, and creatingvirtuous circles of economic dynamism and social cohesion.The idea of Social Europe stresses that the social is, in con-trast to the American model, an integral part of economicintegration and of European capitalism.

This contemporary debate falls back on a long standingEuropean tradition of stressing the interplay between eco-nomic and social modernisation and linking social citizen-ship to economic progress and efficient markets. Thisattempt to bridge the gap between the economic and socialis at the heart of European social policy discourses fromtheir modern origins in the ‘Social Question’ in mid 19thcentury Germany. In fact, the historic meaning of the termwelfare capitalism in the European tradition, in contrast toits American equivalence, which stresses corporate socialresponsibility, is precisely that capitalism requires socialintervention in order to be efficient, and that unregulatedmarket capitalism leads to fundamental social costs and inef-ficiencies. Historians have shown that the very notion of the‘social’ as a specific sphere of intervention, rose in reactionto the idea of social crisis in mid 19th century Europe. Theidea of the social was linked to the observation of the dis-torted effect on the social organisation of free competitionand the elusion of social responsibility in industrial capita-lism. Social reform was invented as a ‘prophylactic’, apreemptive intervention into the organisation of productionto counteract the rising social costs that were equated withmassive failure in efficiency. As prophylaxis, social policywas productive, an economic policy and not a philantropicselfhelp mechanism. This was the tenet of the school ofsocial economy or Sozialökonomie that in the mid 19th centu-ry was formulated by German economists in explicit critiqueof what was then known as ‘English economics’ or‘Manchester liberalism’. The notion of the social was thusgiven an explicitly economic function, and the origin ofmodern social policies must be located in the tension bet-ween the dual challenge of creating a basic level of indivi-

dual security and laying the foundation for the efficient orga-nisation of production through the allocation of socialresources. The idea of social policy and social citizenship asin some way productive is therefore a tradition at the heartof the European project.

However, this notion of the productive effects of socialintervention has taken very different forms in historicEuropean discourses on social policy. The extension of thefranchise and the breakthrough of organised labour saw theadvent of rights based discourses of social citizenship, thatbroke with the conservative debates of the 19th century, inwhich social policy was strictly speaking economic policy,concerned with manpower and not with individual rights. Tothese new discourses, concerned with the transformativerole of social citizenship in the capitalist world, the idea ofsocial intervention as having productive effects became astrategic defense of social rights as well as a normative out-look on how the economic and the social world should beorganised.

This duality in the historical origin of modern social policiesbetween their economic and social motivations has someimportant implications for the way we think about socialcitizenship and the social contract. The tension betweenindividual social security on the one hand, and the collectiveinterest of economic efficiency, stressing productive partici-pation, on the other, is often referred to as a Marshalliandichotomy between rights and responsibilities. Marshall sawthe extension of social citizenship as in a possible state oftension with the market and market efficiency, a tension thatmust be resolved through the matching of rights andresponsibilities. This argument resurfaced in the 1990sthrough Anthony Giddens and others, in a debate that focu-sed mainly on the revocation of the responsibility side,imported and translated from the economics of the supplyside. Marshall’s distinction between rights and responsibili-ties can however be expressed in a slightly different manner,as a tension, in discourses on social citizenship across histo-ry and nations, between an outlook on the individual as aproductive resource or as a rights bearing citizen. These twosides of the social contract are of course intrinsically linked,but the balance between them is historically specific andchanges over time in the history of European welfare states,and acts as a line of demarcation between different andenduring European traditions on welfare. It is also a tensi-on at the heart of the notion of the debate on what socialmodel, which attempts to bridge and reconcile the very dif-ferent interpretations of this relationship that coexist withinthe European tradition.

My ambition in the following pages is to consider what thismeans in terms of the ‘social’ and the ‘liberal’ and the cur-rent renegotiations of ideologies of welfare. EspingAndersen, in his famous typology of welfare states, arguedthat the crucial difference between the social democratic andSwedish welfare regime and its liberal or Anglo-Saxon oppo-

120 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

Reflections on the Meaning of Social and Liberal by Jenny Andersson

Department of Economic History, Uppsala UniversityVisiting Fellow, Center for European Studies, Harvard

site, was the role given to the welfare state for economic effi-ciency in the Swedish model. The universalism of theSwedish model, Esping Andersen argued, was rooted in aproductivism that identified social policy as a productiveinvestment into society’s social resources and into long termeconomic dynamism. This stands against liberal conceptionsof social policy as, ultimately, a cost for market spillovers. ASwedish outlook on social policy as productive meant thatsocial policy was not, as in the liberal model, restricted to theresidual role of dealing with the worst effects of capitalismon the social sphere, but designed as an institutionally redis-tributive strategy for decommodification and equality.

The question is of course to what extent such a distinctionis valid today, after decades of convergence and integration,or indeed if it was ever valid. I argue in the following that itis valid, but the distinction between social and liberal is ofcourse also to some extent a trope. In all fairness, EspingAndersens’ 1990s definition of Sweden as the archetypicalwelfare state was a rather generous description to begin with.The productivist universalism of the Swedish model wasalso economistic and disciplinary. The famous RehnMeidner-model contained an explicit manpower or supplyside orientation that identifiedindividuals and groups as pos-sible labour reserves andsought to bring them into theproduction. The Swedishmodel contained a work ethic,built into the policies andinstitutions of productive uni-versalism, that had nothing todo with administering handouts. It is reflected in the dualitythat is at the core of the Swedish welfare model, between thestrong social rights provided for in income related socialinsurances, based on labour market participation, and muchmore conditional entitlements, often meanstested, for thegroups in the margins of or outside of the labour market. Inaddition, it should be pointed out that the Swedish modelhas gone through a process of substantial change in thedecades of retrenchment, and even if it has rather success-fully emerged on the other side certainly some of its veneerhas flaked. For instance, the conditionality and increasedselectivity that have found their way into Swedish labourmarket policies in the 1990’s were framed in those familiar –distinctly liberal - discourses of incentives that structuredthe process of welfare state modernisation in the last twodecades all over but that are a change with the historicalvalues of the Model. In Sweden just as in other Europeancountries, this has meant that an old emphasis on the politi-cal responsibility for employment and labour market hasbeen increasingly replaced by an emphasis on individualresponsibility, nicely summed up in the Anglo-Saxon term‘employability’, directly translated into Swedish as anställ-ningsbarhet. Employability is a discourse that shies away fromstructural explanations of labour market problems or unem-ployment, and favours explanations that fall back on termsof individual dispositions and lack of skills. In passing, whatare the effects of such a relocation of social responsibilityfrom society to the individual on the solidarity and recipro-city that upholds the welfare state? Recent research by BoRothstein and Eric Uslaner shows that whereas there is a

general and strong relationship between the institutions ofthe welfare state and trust levels in Swedish society, oneinstitution is universally mistrusted by those who have comeinto contact with it, arbetsförmedlingen, the employment office.Why? Maybe because increased selectivity and conditionali-ty leads to stigmatising and frustrating encounters with abureaucracy that, in the absence of actual jobs, is mainlydevoted to the shuffling and reshuffling of individuals bet-ween programmes of reschooling, incapacity benefit andearly retirement. Active labour market policies, some obser-vers suggest, has become passive labour market policies,slowly wearing individuals out.

The UK, on the other hand, has in the period from the late1990s seen an ambitious reform agenda on poverty andunemployment and major institutional changes in social andlabour market policies, to the point that observers suggestthat it has developed a new model of Anglo-social welfare,drawing on the historical elements of liberalism but also onelements imported from Scandinavian style welfare arrange-ments. The supply-side oriented activation policies of theNew Deal are thus suggested to be close in content toScandinavian style ALMPs.

Whereas it is clear both thatthere have been importantconvergences on the policylevel and that, on the normati-ve level of discourse, the mea-ning of social and liberal todayis floating, there are someimportant reflections to be

made here. Importantly, governments in both Sweden andthe UK have articulated modernisation strategies in the lastdecade that stress the positive interplay between economicmodernisation and social citizenship, give a clear role to thestate, and defend the role of social intervention as an inte-grated part of a particular model of capitalism. In Sweden,this is conceptualised in terms of an intimate link betweeneconomic growth and individual security, and in the UK it isdefined as a process of reconciliation between efficiency andsocial justice. Both these strategies give a specific and clearrole to social citizenship in the process of economic moder-nisation. However, the role that they give to social citizen-ship in the process of change is very different, and it isworth highlighting since this difference lies at the very heartof the tensions embedded in the notion of a EuropeanSocial model. These differences can be expressed, somewhatstereotypically, as a distinction between an economicapproach to the social or a social approach to the economy,a distinction that on the level of converging policies canseem academic but that in terms of the normative foundati-ons of the social contract is crucial, because it translates tothe differing conceptions of the individual as primarily arights-bearing citizen or a productive resource in the processof change set out above.

While the Swedish and the British model may in many wayshave become more similar in the last decades, the centralinfluence of New Labour welfare policies was not Sweden,but the US. Policies such as the New Deal were based not ona Swedish interpretation of active labour market policies but

121 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

The central Influence of NewLabour Welfare Policies was not

Sweden, but the US

on the American micro policies developed by the Clintonadministration, that are arguably closer to an American tra-dition of workfare. There is a fine line admittedly betweenwhat might be defined as workfare and what might be defi-ned as active labour market policy in contemporary politics.But let us consider this distinction; workfare makes socialrights conditional upon labour market participation, where-as active labour market policies are based on the notion thatsocial rights are the necessary basis for productive participa-tion. Active labour market policies aim to bring out the pro-ductive potential of all, whereas workfare sees rights as anoutcome, something that is earned in the workplace, andconsequently gives the improductive no or few rights. Theproductivism of the Swedish model was not a stress onresponsibility or obligation, but a stress on the productivepotential of all. Swedish discourse traditionally is not com-fortable with the notion of responsibility but would speak,rather, of the right of all to be productive. Reciprocity, inthis Swedish interpretation, was not about an exchange bet-ween rights and responsibilities, but about the recognitionthat individuals could find themselves in a time of need andthat solidarity was a question of extending help with theknowledge that help would be reciprocated when necessary.The Swedish unwillingness to speak in terms of deservingor undeserving poor or indeed of welfare as a kind of con-tractual exchange relationship, reflects this idea of reciproci-ty based on the recognition of need, but also based on thepresumption that everyone will participate after capacity inthe production, given the help to do so.

In contrast, the British modernisation strategy in the last tenyears has had an overall focus on strengthening the respon-sibility side of social citizenship, ultimately by ‘making workpay’, by strengthening the economic incentives that willinduce individuals to work. The contemporary social invest-ment discourse of New Labour differs substantially fromSwedish productivism in that it focuses on individual obliga-tion and responsibility, but does not emphasize the produc-tive effects of the rights-side of social citizenship. It isstrengthening the responsibility side that is understood aseconomically efficient and consequently as an investment.This strengthening of obligation, in many ways, has been thevery meaning of the notion of modernisation in the Britishreform strategy since the mid 1990s. Arguably, it is even theprerequisite of the British emphasis on reconciliation bet-ween economic efficiency and social justice – the underlyingmeaning being that growth and social justice can be madecoherent ends, through a process of modernisation thatfocuses on strengthening a work ethic, understood as origi-nating in creating a culture of obligation.

Another important and prevailing difference between thesocial and the liberal model concerns the question of secu-rity. The Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson insists thatthere can be no change without security, whereas the Britishchancellor Gordon Brown repeats that there can be no secu-rity without change. In Swedish discourse, security is seen asa precondition for successful change, and the only way ofmaking sure that individuals cope with structural transfor-mation and that ‘all come along’ as is the slogan of the 2006election campaign [alla ska med]. Contemporary Swedish

labour market policies have been organised around a notionof flexibility interpreted as security in change. This reflectsthe historic emphasis in the Swedish model that insecuritycreates inefficiencies and hampers growth, whereas securitycreates courageous individuals who, in the words of theSwedish PM, ‘dare spend, be creative, criticise and have ideasin the workplace, study and raise a family’. Individual securi-ty, in this manner, is given a direct link to growth, producti-vity, and competitiveness, and insecurity is linked to laggard-ness, unruly competition and fundamental inefficiency. Inthe UK, this relationship is the opposite; security tends to beidentified with what stands in the way of successful change,on a par with dynamism and opportunity, associated withreactionary vested interests and welfare dependency. In theBritish model, flexibility is about the individual willingnessto constantly embrace change, and the capacity to adapt tochanging demands for skill in the market place. Equippingworkers for change by giving them the skills to keep up witha fiercely competitive world is at the core of the British ‘fle-xibility plus’, but it is a long way from the way that the noti-on of security in change, rhetorically at least, aspires to setindividual needs and security at the heart of the process ofmodernisation, which, theoretically at least, also means thatindividual needs for security also set the limits of the pace ofchange. Similar patterns reflect in the shifting notions ofresponsibility between employers and employees. In theBritish model the predominant notion of responsibility isindividual responsibility while Swedish politics have attemp-ted to strengthen the responsibility of the corporate sphere,for instance in the debate on the work environment andwork/life balance.

The differences I have pointed to above highlight theongoing renegotiation of meaning of the terms ‘social’ and‘liberal’, but they also point to out the extent to which thequestion of how the relationship between the economic andthe social should be organised is a key source of divergencewithin social Europe. The social contract is, on the onehand, a question of the organisation of the balance betweenthe economic and the social, it is of course also a questionof the relationship between politics and the individual.

The prevailing distinction between a social or social demo-cratic model and a liberal or Anglosaxon model that I havetried to outline in the previous pages is a distinction betweentwo very different social contracts. One contains a socialapproach to the economic, which is about giving social citi-zenship a central role in the process of economic moderni-sation, ultimately also setting social limits to the process ofeconomic change. The other, rather, is most accurately des-cribed as an attempt to reappraise the social in economicterms. In the Swedish model this translates to an emphasison the role of politics to free individual productive potenti-al by providing security, collective responsibility and strongsocial rights, whereas, in the UK, activating individuals is,predominantly, about strengthening the individual responsi-bility to grasp opportunity and using politics to ‘tap’ the pro-ductive potential of all. British politics, then, have so farbeen closer to an economistic appropriation of the socialthan they have been about setting in place a normative out-look on how the relationship between economy and societyshould be organised, which arguably is what the Swedish

122 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

model is all about. To that extent, if there is an anglo-socialmodel of welfare, it has accommodated the social in adistinctly liberal way.

These differences between the social and the liberal are notcarved in stone, nor are they in my view dictated by histori-cal traditions or institutions in each country, even if they areindisputably structured by such institutional stickiness. Theyare of course influenced by a variety of factors in economic,social and political history that go beyond what I am tryingto show here. What is important however is that these soci-al contracts are also dynamic and the focal points of debateand discursive struggle in each country. In Sweden, the 2006election will clearly involve a debate on the role of individualresponsibility and activation policy, and in the UK, the ideaof a progressive consensus has lead to a re-examining of thevalues of the British model. On the European level, socialand liberal discourses coexist in a similar state of tension

and renegotiation. What social Europe is or will be is a que-stion for our future. For this future debate however, thehistorical reflection that I have offered here suggests a war-ning. A social model defined by the economy turns theworldview of the social economists, that the economy has tobe controlled in order to recreate social efficiency, on itshead. Rather it is economic efficiency that needs to be resto-red and the social is left to be fine-tuned, restructured, andrationalised. This is not social economy, but an economicapproach to the social that defines the individual first andforemost as a productive resource. Arguably the notion ofsocial Europe is still closer to this economising of the soci-al than it is to a genuinely social model of capitalism, whichwould involve giving a constructive role to the rights-side ofsocial citizenship and accepting the idea that this may meansetting individual social needs at the heart of the process ofmodernisation.

123 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

References

Andersson, Jenny (2004): A Productive Social Citizenship? Reflections on the Notion of Productive Social Policies in the European Tradition, in: Magnusson, Lars, Bo Stråth: A European Social Citizenship,

Brussels, PIE Peter Lang.

Esping-Andersen, Gøsta (1990): The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge, Polity.

Garsten, Christina, Kerstin Jacobsson (2004). Learning to Be Employable. New Agendas on Work,Responsibility, and Learning in a Globalizing World, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Giddens, Anthony (1998): The Third Way. The Renewal of Social Democracy, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Marshall, TH (1992): Citizenship and Social Class, London, Pluto Press.

Pearce, Nick, Will Paxton (2005): Social Justice. Building a Fairer Britain, London, IPPR.

Rodgers, D. (1998): Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age, Boston, Harvard University Press.

Rothstein, Bo, Eric Uslaner (2006 forthcoming): All for All. Equality and Social Trust, World Politics, vol. 56.

Steinmetz, George (1993): Regulating the Social. The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany,Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Europe's current impasse is of a different kindthan previous deadlocks. The rejection of theConstitution in France and the Netherlands are

symptomatic of the cultural and political insecurity inthe enlargement and integration of the furthest formof polity from the people. The EU's legitimacy deficitand failure to connect with the people of Europe poseschallenges with which the democratic left must engage.These challenges will not be resolved by tackling unem-ployment and economic underperformance alone andthe danger is that the policy gap will be filled by neo-liberal solutions if the pro-European left does not pro-vide a coherent alternative.

Part of the reason for the ‘no’votes and Europe's wider post-modern malaise, particularly inWestern Europe, is a fear that theEU is part of the globalisationprocess, which has become per-ceived as a threat to identity, com-munity and values. The crudereductionism of public politicaldebate, limitation of European cul-tural exchange and lack of a clearEU message has led to enlargementbeing interpreted as a coup by newEurope over old Europe ratherthan a de facto win-win. The fear ofPolish plumbers and eastern immi-gration, while in part economic, isalso a cultural anxiety.

Broadcasting policy offers onemeans of engaging these concernsand position Europe as an enablerto globalisation rather than a causeof the process. Solidarity in diversity underpinned by acommonality of values and a shared cultural heritagemust drive European broadcasting policy.

Globalisation challenges European cultural diversity infilm, broadcasting, media and communications policy.Audiovisual policy cannot be viewed as simply anothermarket sector to be liberalised. Given the economicspecificity of the sector, a free market in broadcastingwould lead to the dumping of American bundled prod-ucts on European markets; the subsequent externalityis likely to be that less people would watch free to airnational channels whose budgets and high valuenational programming would come under increasingthreat. It is clear from the ever increasing EU:US audio-visual trade deficit that a free market in film would leadto the almost total monopolisation and hegemony ofAmerican film and broadcasting.

Instead an international audiovisual policy whichensures the democratisation of communications, thebalance of global information flows and protectionagainst monopolies and consolidation of ownershipunderpinned by the principle of cultural diversity,would protect indigenous cultural heritage. Currentlythe trade deficit in television and film between the EUand the USA is over $8bn and over 70 per cent of allfilms screened on TV in the EU are from the USA.This imbalance needs to be redressed.

The EU recognises and supports cultural diversity as a'dominant European characteristic and a fundamental

political objective' and considersaudiovisual and electronic communi-cation to be the heart of a crucialsector for the transmission of thecultural, social and democratic valuesof Europe. While the TelevisionWithout Frontier directive (TVWF)has ensured terrestrial channels meetquotas of 51 per cent of Europeancontent in broadcasting, non-terres-trials generally fail to meet this quota.For example over 40 non-terrestrialUK licensed channels do not meetthis requirement and make little orno contribution to national/EUaudiovisual production and creativity.

The EU Media programme whichsupports training, production, devel-opment and distribution of filmneeds far greater resources to devel-op transfrontier broadcasting. ARTEthe Franco-German channel carryingdocumentaries and films has a foot-

print from Scandinavia through North Africa to Israelalso need greater support and promotion in memberstates.

The Commission's 'D Plan' for democracy, dialogueand debate and recent White Paper on communicationpolicy while providing a sound basis for a more sustain-able communications policy needs a more politicaldimension to overcome the EU's bureaucratic image.While the Commission must communicate a clear mes-sage there also needs to be greater European news cov-erage. For example EURONEWS based in Lyon whichused to receive a small subsidy from the EU, againneeds greater funding and coverage in order to enjoy agreater participation in a European media sphere.

124 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

European Cultural Diversity in Broadcasting by Carole Tongue & Richard Daniels

The EU faces two key challenges which it can addressin part through broadcasting policy; Europe needs tobridge the legitimacy gap and to explain its raison d'êtreto younger citizens. It is clear that national politicalimperatives will challenge the EU's message and there-fore there must be a broadcasting space which gives thevarious institutions a right of reply, in particularly theParliament. This will show the Union to be more thana nebulous bureaucracy with a unified aim. Such a spacewould also provide the opportunity to engage widergroups and citizens into broader European debates andtransnational exchange. The mantra that Europe is notBrussels must always apply.

The EU has to engage younger generations. RecentEurobarometer polls have shown whether in terms oftrust, image or assessment of EU membership, all theindicators have fallen. The perceivedpeace and prosperity secured by theEU is not accepted as relevant byyounger citizens; social democratsneed to demonstrate Europe's uniqueheritage, convergence of EU citizensviews on social standards and welfareand that a shared albeit diverse cultureunites Europe as a region of sharedvalues and history as well as providingeconomic solutions and social protec-tion to globalisation.

One welcome start for example isEurokidnet, a new EU funded pan-European digital children's mediachannel whose content will be createdentirely by children and will create abroadcasting medium for European cultural exchangefor children. New digital children's channels shouldlook to carry more film from across the EU andbeyond. There also needs to be more co-productionbetween European public service broadcasters to rivalUS blockbuster output for children. Why was the EUincapable of supporting Wallace and Gromit featurelength films for example? The EU Media programmeshould set aside a proportion of its funds to be invest-ed in children's film.

The EU has to communicate its successes and functionto generations whose politics have been shaped by postmodernity, post ideology and single issue politics. Thispositioning de facto gives the pro-European left a strongadvantage. As national mass based parties struggle tomaintain membership and engage younger voters, sin-gle issues which can only be solved through interna-tional cooperation offers the space for the left to pro-vide transnational solutions to the emerging politicalconsciousness. Indeed the failure to meet these chal-lenges and the dangers of the re-emergence of nation-alism and centre right politics, signs of which are clearin electoral results over the last decade, should act as adriver to mobilise the pro-European left.

The UNESCO convention on Cultural Diversity pro-vides an instructive model for a European audiovisualspace. The Convention establishes an internationalprinciple that broadcasting is more than a commodityand that cultural diversity should be protected as acommon heritage of humanity.

There was a convergence of views separating thosewho saw the UNESCO Convention as a protectionistpolicy, which was led by US, Australia and Japan andthose supporting cultural diversity as an internationalprinciple. The EU negotiated for the principle of inter-national legislation protecting the special treatment ofcultural goods and services as 'vehicles of identity, val-ues and meaning'. The EU's negotiation position wassupported by all member states and reveals a commonview that international diversity of cultural expression

should be protected by legislation.

European attitudes surveys show thatthere is strong evidence thatEuropeans want to know more abouttheir neighbors through broadcastingpolicy. There is also evidence to sug-gest that EU citizens make no cleardistinction between information andentertainment. If content meaning isnot clearly delineated it is apparentthat any European communicationstrategy needs to use a range of poli-cies. This is why a clear communica-tions policy needs to be complement-ed with stronger demands for invest-ment in and screening of EU audiovi-sual production in TVWF.

With reference to the revised TVWF directive, in theinterests of fair competition between linear broadcast-ing and non-linear broadcasting services, both pay TVchannels and non-linear audiovisual media servicesshould be required to make a financial contribution tothe production and acquisition of European works.These new audiovisual media services should also berequired to provide an appropriate share of Europeanworks in their catalogues. All EU member states shouldratify the UNESCO convention on cultural diversityand devise programmes to fulfill its objectives. EUCulture Ministers must demand a greater budget forEuropean news and other cultural channels. The 3rdMEDIA programme 2001-05 received only 0.06 percent of the Union's budget which makes it impossibleto compete with Hollywood. Although this budget willdouble between 2007-13 it is still relatively small, espe-cially given we have ten new member states and thereare financial challenges to SME's in the market andfrom digital technology. The Community's overallaudiovisual budget still remains at only 0.1 per cent ofthe whole budget.

There also needs to be an increase in transfrontier TVchannels carrying European productions, particularlyfilms, dramas and documentaries. There should also be

125 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

more coverage of EU debates on national media chan-nels with cross frontier participation. Euronews shouldbe upgraded to a more significant news and documen-tary outlet across the EU. Co-productions betweenEuropean channels also need to be increased.

In reflecting on the Constitution, it is imperative toretain its support for the active promotion of culturaland linguistic diversity and the inscription of culture asa fundamental goal as written into various parts of theConstitution and the Charter of Fundamental Rights.The EU must also maintain its WTO negotiating man-date in support of cultural diversity and maintain una-nimity for the WTO negotiations and conclusions ofagreements in the field. The EU should also work toensure that bilateral agreements do not undermine theinternational principle of cultural diversity.

The EU should also look harder at how the EuropeanInvestment Bank can increase funding support for theEU audiovisual industry to underpin new innovationsin support of greater audiovisual cultural diversityavailable for all EU citizens.

Cultural diversity is at the heart of social Europe. It canact as a humanising agent to a political project commu-nicated in economic terms. Europe's current challengeand one of the guiding principles of the Conventionwas to bring Europe closer to the peoples of Europe.It is clear that only a broadcasting policy which protectscultural diversity while increasing cultural exchange anda sustainable communications policy will provide amechanism to bring Europe closer it its citizens.

At this time of reflection we should not lose perspec-tive, the European project has been hugely successful.It has delivered prosperity and contributed, withNATO, to peace across the region through cooperationand the pooling of national sovereignty. Reactionaryforces continually work to ensure that obsolete argu-ments and narratives survive. The democratic leftneeds to present a clear message to the peoples ofEurope: through cooperation and solidarity we canmeet the challenges of the modern world.That message has to be carried in the most powerfulmedium of communication - the screen - to all genera-tions of EU citizens.

126 Social Europe the journal of the european left March 2006

Carole Tongue is a former the British Labour Party MEP and spokesperson on public service broadcasting. She is also Chairof the UK Independent Film Parliament.

Richard Danielsis an active member in the Labour movement with a special interest in European centre left politics.

We would like to express our special gratitude to Chloé Aublin,Stephen Barber and Jeannette Ladzik who helped a great deal in thedevelopment of this issue.

All the views expressed in the articles of this issue are those of theauthors and do not necessarily represent the views of Social EuropeForum.

All rights reservedSocial Europe Forum© 2006

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