Over the past seventy years, the European Left has had an ambiguous relationship with European integration. While especially the more centrist and conservative elements of European social democracy and the trade unions have come to embrace European integration, many on the left still see the European Union as a capitalist bloc, doing the bidding of big business and embracing globalization to the detriment of workers’ rights.
Andry's book Social Europe, the Road not Taken challenges this perception of the left's aloofness from European cooperation. Analysing the “long 1970s”, the study describes this period as a unique “window of opportunity” for the European Left, during which it worked to transform the European Community (EC) from an organization primarily focused on market integration to a “Social Europe” that foregrounded social and economic rights of its citizens and workers and reined in the forces of the free market. She thereby also challenges the idea that “social Europe” came about only in the 1980s and was an invention by the Commission President Jacques Delors (1985–1995). Delors's social Europe, with a small “s”, she argues, was merely a way to mitigate the worst effects of increased market integration that came about with the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty, but it was not designed to challenge the capitalist economic model. Andry's volume is one of several recent studies that revisit the 1970s as a critical juncture, a period of opportunity and transition, leading to deep economic, technological, political, and social transformations. However, it is the first study to focus in-depth on the (missed) opportunity to turn Western Europe into the “most socially advanced area in the world” (Willy Brandt, cited p. 108).Footnote 1
The “window of opportunity” opened up in the late 1960s. External economic shocks, such as the breakdown of institutions like Bretton Woods that had underpinned an unprecedented period of post-war economic growth and the 1973 oil shock, triggered a search for alternatives to Keynesian economic policy solutions that turned out to be unsuited to reining in the high inflation, rising unemployment, and low economic growth that paralysed European economies. Internally, under pressure from the demands of the 1968 student and workers protests, and mindful of the need to ensure the continued support of European citizens for the European project, politicians became keener on introducing social policy aims in the EC. Until then, EC member states had followed a division of tasks, with the EC in charge of trade liberalization and market integration and the nation states in charge of building a welfare state at home. Finally, as Andry emphasizes, the shift to the left in Western European societies brought socialist and social democrat politicians into positions of power and influence. Socialist parties and politicians dominated the European political scene and hence the EC for much of the decade.
Ultimately, though, Andry tells a story of missed opportunities, of high hopes, and the eventual failure of the left to realize “Social Europe”. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources from the European Community, trade unions, political parties, and individual actors, Andry charts out in detail the proposals of the European Left for Social Europe. She records the initiatives, and the bargaining over ideas and proposals in various settings, such as transnational party and trade unions networks and European institutions (including the Commission), the Council of Ministers, and the European Parliament. Finally, she advances arguments as to why Social Europe failed, none of which are unexpected, but here they emerged vividly from Andry's rich and thoroughly contextualized narrative of the 1970s economic crisis, geopolitical constraints, the pitfalls of multi-level decision-making, and competing visions for a different society and economy.
The volume charts the rise and fall of Social Europe in six chronological chapters. The first briefly explores the difficult relationship between the European Left and European integration from the 1940s to the 1960s, highlighting their disappointment at the lack of commitment to social change and workers’ rights in the treaties of the new European organizations. However, the wave of student protests and workers unrest of the late 1960s, the subject of the second chapter, challenged the left to find a response to their demands, also at the European level, giving rise to the idea of a Social Europe. This also coincided with greater monetary and macroeconomic challenges. The post-war era of welfare capitalism had come to an end. But what should replace it? European leaders revived discussions on “the social dimension of European integration” (p. 95) as part of their response at their summit meeting at The Hague in 1969.
Chapters Three and Four chart these first steps towards Social Europe following The Hague and a second summit in Paris in 1972, where the EC heads of state and government agreed on an ambitious programme to turn the EC into the most socially advanced region of social and economic prosperity. Initiatives and reforms included the creation of a regional policy and the creation of the Standing Committee on Employment (SCE), a new body with an albeit very limited role. These reforms were to accompany further “deepening” of economic integration through Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The Social Action Programme was adopted with thirty measures and nine priority actions, including equality between men and women at work in terms of equal pay, access to unemployment, training, and promotion. After this success, progress towards EMU stalled, and so did progress towards Social Europe.
For the left, these measures did not go far enough. For example, trade unions had also campaigned for a complete transformation of the European Social Fund to underpin a fully fledged EC employment policy. This did not come to pass. These issues shed light on a core problem of the European Left, namely the lack of organization among trade unions and European socialists at the European level, their lack of unity and of preparedness. Instead of receiving a boost when the EC was enlarged in 1973 to include the UK, Denmark, and Ireland, large parts of the left in the UK were Eurosceptic and hampered effective transnational party cooperation, adopting a combative stance towards EC institutions. In these chapters, Andry also outlines many interesting theoretical and programmatic advances among European socialists, including exploring alternatives to capitalism, responding to the Global South's demands for a New International Economic Order, and the left's criticism of the growth paradigm that emerged in the early 1970s, specifically as a reaction to the Club of Rome report, the Limits to Growth (1972).
In the late 1970s, the deepening economic crisis led to intensifying distributional conflicts, as Chapters Five and Six show. Andry explores the last stage of the fight for alternative economic models in a climate of worsening economic crisis and increasing globalization with the seemingly inexorable rise of multinational enterprises. With centrist politicians worrying about the European economy's competitiveness and responding with demands for wage restraint, the response of many on the left was an increased militancy and radicalization of their programme. Arguing that an alternative path was possible, Andry presents this crisis period of the late 1970s as another window of opportunity, during which the New Left developed ever more radical ideas for reorganizing the economy and an “alternative European order”. Among these “new planners” was the French socialist Jacques Delors, who thus provides perhaps more continuity between the social Europe of the 1970s and that of the 1980s than Andry gives him credit for.
So, why did Social Europe fail? The book presents a plethora of ideas, programmes, and manifestos devised by the left during the 1970s. While it is therefore valid for Andry to state that, “the Western European Left was much more engaged in formulating and coordinating new answers to the crisis of the 1970s than is usually assumed by historians” (p. 201), these answers were never adopted by a broad coalition of socialists in positions of power. Instead, the multitude of proposals convey the picture of a split and “bitty” socialist movement. Moreover, until the late 1970s, with the first elections to the European Parliament imminent, there seem to have been few attempts to convince European citizens of these solutions.
The lack of unity also becomes apparent in the often-uneasy coexistence of the “New Left” and the “old left”. Of the former, Sicco Mansholt became a champion of Social Europe, campaigning for the EC to become a vehicle for real social change and a vanguard for the new environmentalism. Mansholt clashed with the “old left”, the more traditional and conservative strands of social democracy. Andry singles out Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of the EC's largest economy, West Germany, as an obstacle to Social Europe. Indeed, Schmidt was an early adopter of monetarism to control inflation and advocated limiting wage growth. However, perhaps the study could have shown more consideration for the political constraints and limited margin of manoeuvre of figures such as Schmidt, who was in a coalition with the economically liberal Free Democrats and had to deal with a wave of left-wing domestic terrorism and an electorate that was generally terrified of inflation. Andry also misconstrues the “Radikalenerlass”, suggesting that this piece of legislation in Germany “discriminated against left-wing ‘radicals’ in their access to public services” (p. 284) whereas it was designed to allow background checks on suspected “radicals” or terrorists to prevent them from becoming civil servants.
The absence of women in this volume is surprising. Even though social policy and gender equality were becoming important issues in the 1970s and were championed by many women, the book mentions only one female actor, the Member of the European Parliament Astrid Lulling. There were others around at the time, not least Brandt's Minister for Europe, Katharina Focke, who drafted Brandt's programme for the 1969 and 1972 summits, or, indeed, Petra Kelly, one of the founders of the German Green Party, who influenced Mansholt's thinking on environmentalism.
Overall, though, the book makes an important contribution to the historiography of European integration, European socialism, and economic thought. It brings to the fore the contributions of many forgotten economic thinkers and theorists of the left that merit revisiting. The book is also eerily topical since the EU is, once again, at a crossroads, confronted with increasing inequality, a cost-of-living crisis, rising populism, and the threats of climate change, to all of which answers need to be found.
