Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000

by Geoff Eley

Democracy in Europe has been a recent phenomenon. Only in the wake of World War II were democratic frameworks secured, and, even then, it was decades before democracy truly blanketed the continent.

Neither given nor granted, democracy requires conflict, often violent confrontations, and challenges to the established political order. In Europe, Geoff Eley convincingly shows, democracy did not evolve organically out of a natural consensus, the achievement of prosperity, or the negative cement of the Cold War. Rather, it was painstakingly crafted, continually expanded, and doggedly defended by varying constellations of socialist, feminist, Communist, and other radical movements that originally blossomed in the later nineteenth century. Parties of the Left championed democracy in the revolutionary crisis after World War I, salvaged it against the threat of fascism, and renewed its growth after 1945. They organized civil societies rooted in egalitarian ideals which came to form the very fiber of Europe's current democratic traditions. The trajectories of European democracy and the history of the European Left are thus inextricably bound together.

Geoff Eley has given us the first truly comprehensive history of the European Left--its successes and failures; its high watermarks and its low tides; its accomplishments, insufficiencies, and excesses; and, most importantly, its formative, lasting influence on the European political landscape. At a time when the Left's influence and legitimacy are frequently called into question, Forging Democracy passionately upholds its vital contribution.

Genres: History, Politics, European History, Nonfiction, History and Politics, Theory, 19th Century

720 pages, Paperback

First published March 18, 2002

About the author

Geoffrey Howard Eley is a British-born historian of Germany. He studied History at the Balliol College of Oxford University and received his D.Phil from the University of Sussex in 1974. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the Department of History since 1979 and the Department of German Studies since 1997. He now serves as the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at Michigan.

Eley's early work focused on the radical nationalism in Imperial Germany and fascism, but has since grown to include theoretical and methodological reflections on historiography and the history of the political left in Europe.

Reviews

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another exhaustive but essential text on the European Left, in the mould of Sassoon's "100 Years". Whilst I can't say I agree with everything the book put forwards regarding the post-1968 period, many of its broader themes I found compelling.

5 Key Arguments:

1. 'The Left' has been the driving force behind, and reason for, the development of European democracy: “Socialist parties were formed to give government by the people coherent, centralized, and lasting political form. Until the First World War and to a great extent since, those parties carried the main burden of democratic advocacy in Europe. For most of the period covered in this book, in fact, the banner of democracy was held up most consistently by the socialist tradition.” (5)

2. The history of this forging of democracy can be divided by 5 moments of: “transnational constitution-making in modern European history” (5), that is:

1. 1776-1815
2. 1859-71
3. 1914-23
4. 1943-49
5. 1989-92

From the 1860's, the socialist party would seek to constantly expand democratic boundaries.

3. Modern democracy is beholden to this leftist pressure: “The political values the Left fought for in those moments, and in the long and arduous intervals in between, have become the values we all accept… socialists have been fundamentally responsible for all that we hold dear about democracy, from the pursuit of the democratic franchise, the securing of civil liberties, and the passing of the first democratic constitutions to the more contentious ideals of social justice, the broadening definitions of citizenship, and the welfare state.” (12)

4. Following 1968, the left is no longer synonymous with labour and the socialist parties, instead becoming the field of the Greens and the extra-parliamentary opposition. This affected the social democrats in particular, who had: “both lost momentum by the 1960s, having realized its main reforms, and rejected 1968 as a source for renewal. Most decisively of all, the end of the postwar boom in 1973 removed the main prop of social democratic success, because postwar corporatisms couldn’t function without the continuously rising prosperity.” (500)

A large part of this shift was due to the demographic changes in the proletariat: “While classic male proletarians in mining, transportation, and manufacture declined, with their unions, residential concentration, and family living, another working class made up of mainly female white-collar and menial workers in services and all types of public employment unevenly materialized in its place.” (404)

5. The shift in promoter of democracy between Old and New Lefts had been spearheaded by feminism: “By the 1980s feminism had not ‘transformed society’, but the utopianism of Women’s Liberation- ‘its wild wish’- had redefined ‘the scope and conceptualization of what is politics.’ (381); "Feminism was a vital bridge" (421)

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Socialist movements were the main actors in moving Europe away from monarchy or limited oligarchical representational schemes to something like democracy after the mid-19th century, and Geoff Eley lays out the process in this book. Democratization in Europe was driven by socialists fighting for the expansion of the franchise (and freedom of speech and the press), and organizing against the successor to monarchy as the great impediment to people’s control over their lives: capitalism. Eley masterfully balances the big picture of broad changes in European society and socialist politics with picking particular examples from across Europe to illustrate the dynamics involved. “Forging Democracy” is a highly valuable source book for people who want to know when, exactly, social security legislation was passed, or which party joined which International when, along with being a pretty good read.

Socialists accomplished the task of democratization both through organizing and mobilizing masses of ordinary people and through expanding the definition of politics- most importantly politicizing control over labor and the economy. When they failed — when they couldn’t move a given society towards democracy, or when they themselves took steps (leaps, sometimes) away from it — it was largely because they stopped actually representing the people or else decided on a hard, arbitrary stopping point for where politics ends and so too does the democratizing vision. I don’t generally have enough of a dog in any of the various inter-left factional fights that Eley lays out — and lord knows there’s enough of them — to be bothered by his even-handed approach. There’s blame — and praise — to go around.

It’s inspiring at times but also kind of depressing. A lot of the savage-cum-petty disputation I see among leftists online is them going through the motions of these long-ago figures, enlisting them as dead manikin props in a game of decontextualized referents and overlaying their scripts onto the various petty disputes and personality conflicts in their own organizing lives. But then, what would it be like if we actually did get our shit together (to the extent that anyone really does)? On the one hand, the various socialists of yore do a lot of impressive organizing and achieve some very important gains (more than we look to be doing). On the other, they consistently fall into infighting, lose a lot, or else gain some measure of power and either devolve into dictatorship or else staid bureaucrats uninterested in challenging capital or expanding democracy (or into staid bureaucratic dictatorship). A lot of what socialism achieved were the remains of or reactions to more ambitious agendas- bourgeois politicians working with social democrats (or postwar Communist parties in Western Europe) to expand economic democracy because they’re afraid of revolutionary upheaval, etc. Nobody’s program actually goes off the way they think it will, including more moderate actors who avow themselves as having flexible (or no) programs.

I guess that’s politics for you, and it’s not as though bourgeois politics sounds great if described critically either. I guess part of the issue is the contrast between the unique transformative promise of socialism and the reality of the sort of politics it takes to get anywhere, even to stay in existence in repressive societies. Premodern political philosophers like Machiavelli, whatever they lacked in transformative vision (hard to see that kind of secular transformation when everyone craps in a box), had a lot of insight about political process as a relationship between people, political/social structures, and time. I think sometimes leftists elide thinking about these things and basically punt towards the transformative vision- we’ve got such good ideas it has to work out if people are true to them (and then squabble about what that looks like, etc). Eley doesn’t challenge that directly but it’s not his job. His job is to present the story, and to me, that story tells us that our vision is fundamental to what we do- but not enough, not by a long shot, and neither is any particular formula for political action. We need to actually think and decide for ourselves, and take the task seriously enough to think critically about the situations we actually live. *****

https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...

[Brendan Campisi · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive book in many ways, sometimes frustrating but almost always thought-provoking.

At the most general level, Eley examines the rise and fall of the socialist tradition in Europe, arguing convincingly that it had its roots in the way industrialization created a particular type of working-class urban spaces, which through local governments in turn created opportunities for reforms capable of sustaining popular allegiance. The configuration of class identification expressed by the agencies of the parliamentary party of socialism--social democratic or Communist--and its national union federation dominated left politics from their origins in the late 19th century to the 1960s. From then, the social underpinnings of this formation came apart, and by the end of the 20th century they had been replaced by new forms of fragmentary social-movement organizing.

In telling this story, Eley deals with an extraordinary range of specific issues, and necessarily not everything is covered in equal detail or with the same analytical sharpness. One consistent strength is Eley's keen attention to the gendered limitations of historical left politics. His discussions of the ambiguities of women's participation in left parties, and left parties' approaches to women, are challenging and insightful. His discussion of the politics of 'culture,' both at the level of the cultures the left sought to create and sustain, and the ways leftists related to commercial popular culture, is similarly sharp.

Where Eley stumbles, in my view, is in his treatment of the period between 1918 and 1939, when the capitalist order in Europe was most insecure. His emphasis on the 'democratic' as opposed to specifically socialist nature of the left project leads him to substantially sidestep the question of revolutionary possibilities during this period, and to make sometimes jarring criticisms of the supposed failure of forces like the Italian Socialists after World War I or the Spanish Socialists in the '30s not to realize the impossibility of revolution and get on with Popular Front coalition-building instead.

Overall, despite some disagreements and the fact that it may not cover your particular area of interest in enough depth, this is very much worth the effort.

[Göker Makaskıran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Düşündüğümden daha iyi bir çalışmaymış. Tarihsel sosyoloji ve Marksizm üzerine oluşturulan okuma listelerinde yer alması gereken bir metin.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eley writes in this very long history a detailed history of the socialist movement in Europe and its rise, crisis, decline into the 1990s. He argues that there is something uniquely inspiring about masses of people in political motion, and that the most important gains for democracy, in both the legal sense and the social sense, have been through concentrated revolutionary periods. He argues these periods of mass socialist movement in industrial European history which challenged political and economic order are 1776-1815, 1859-1871, 1914-1923, 1943-1949, and 1989-1992. From the 1860s on, the socialist movement was organized and pushed the boundaries of capitalism and the state, with mixed results, though Eley seems to think poorly of the Anarchist movement which came directly out of the factionalization of the 1st International and was hugely influencial in leftist political movements. He notes the long crisis of Socialism from the 1960s on, as it had lost much credibility because of the brutality and utter control by Stalinism and its Soviet successors, which resulted in fresh challenges by new feminism, identity based political movements, alternative political scenes, cumulating in the rebellions of 1968. Socialist labor movements developed in the 1880s-1930s, and saw their height from there through the 1960s, when the traditional working class began to fractionalize.

Key Themes and Concepts
-Socialism was society based on mutual cooperation instead of individual competition, originally.
-Leftist social democrats were influencial in parliamentary politics but tended to top out at 1/4th-1/3rd of the total vote, even as they pushed for larger enfranchisement.
-It pushed for a democratic running of the economy.
-It largely failed women and transmitted masculine ideas of the industrial working class.
-There was tension between secret plots and mass democratic practices.
-The 2nd International fell apart after social democrats fell in line in ww1.
-Vanguardism eventually clouded democratic impulses of socialism after the success of the Russian Revolution. The 3rd International was dominated by and for the Soviet Union, eventually crushing any creativity by local Communist Parties.
-The sidelining of issues by Socialist mass parties, such as women’s rights and ethnic minorities, eventually ended up sidelining Socialists.
-1968 ended forever the domination of socialist movements by Communist Parties.

[Clayton Whisnant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book that explores the relationship between socialism and the wider Left since the mid-nineteenth century. There is one, big weakness: it is quite long for what is really an extended essay. Only an academic audience will be able to make it through this dense tome; however, an academic audience will also be familiar with much of the detail. It would have been better with, say, 200 pages cut; however, I still learned a lot, and it certainly changed how I view the Left. A very ambitious book that reconfirms Geoff Eley's position among the top historians out there today.

[Ararat Gocmen · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a detailed chronology of the Europe-wide left’s successes and failures from the mid-19th century to the end of the 20th century, this work is impressive in its breadth. At its most interesting, it projects backward some of the few successes of today’s parliamentary center-left (e.g., paying close attention to and being responsive to women’s interests) to criticize the mass workers’ parties of the Old Left during their political heyday in the early 20th century. Nevertheless, Eley is a bit too fatalistic as he documents what he sees as the secular decline of social democracy in Europe after 1947, only accelerated by key moments in 1956, 1968, 1973, and 1989. He also totally understates the steadily accumulating victories of the increasingly radical right from 1980 onwards—to the extent that his contemporary accounts of the nascent center-left neoliberalism of the late 1990s (the book was published in 2002) portends nothing of its failures’ eventual contribution to the rise of the far right in Europe, as we have witnessed since 2008. With the benefit of such hindsight post-2008, there is room— if not a need—for another history of the European left (especially post-WWII) to be written.

[Minäpäminä · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loads of dry details and some shoehorned-in feminism. I also spotted some falsities which cast doubts on the validity of the rest. But it is an acceptable attempt at a very general, macro-level presentation of the European Left (with an undue focus on Central Europe and Great Britain) from 1850 to 2000.

[Christmas Norris · Rating 4 out of 5]

As required course reading goes, this was really good.

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 4 out of 5]

If capitalism is striving it is because of the left's fights and reformations.

Excellent book.

[Juan Antonio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leyendo la edición en español, "Un mundo por conquistar".