Moschonas Gerassimos - In the Name of Social Democracy: The Great Transformation from 1945 to the Present

A first version of this book was published in France in 1994 by Montchrestien as La Social-dmocratie de 1945 nos jours. The original ambition of the English edition was to offer an updated translation of it. But as work progressed, that objective underwent significant alteration, and I have expanded my horizons considerably. It is always in the act of writing that a book is produced and, at the same time, transformed and unveiled. In truth, the present work is new and different, but the themes and problematic it develops are very closely related to those presented more succinctly in the French. While there is no need for the reader to refer to it, it is worth indicating that the French text is not simply a shorter version of the current work, although it is that too.

Six years later, the change in social democracy has become the focal point of our analysis. The present study does still seek to provide an overview of the evolution of social democracy, particularly since the Second World War, but the main emphasis is on social democracy today on what (to adopt Karl Polanyis well-known phrase) we regard as a great transformation. Although the foundations and reference points on which the historical social-democratic movement was constructed are neither totally shaken nor eroded, social democracy is living through a change of epoch. This explains the books subtitle.

The constraints inherent in any publication have obliged me to disaggregate certain aspects of the social-democratic phenomenon for the purposes of examining them more closely. I have therefore set aside a detailed study of socialism in southern Europe something undertaken, in succinct but incomplete fashion, in the French edition (a very detailed examination of the French case was the subject of my doctoral thesis in 1990). This basic choice derived from a concern not to exceed the stipulated word length. But another reason informed my decision and explains this lacuna, which is unquestionably a major one. Although they belong to the same great European socialist/social-democratic family, the parties of southern Europe are less and less strictly tied as political forms to the binary opposition between the social-democratic and the non-social-democratic. In and through a dual dynamic of convergence, the socialisms of the south are converging with the more classical social democracies, which are themselves undergoing de-social-democratization. The effect is to reduce the old contrasts and narrow the gaps characteristic of a still recent past. Thus, the opposition between southern socialism and more classical social democracy (conceived as an opposition between logical types) is in part-but only in part diluted. Apart from the space constraints on an already long book, this is the main reason for not examining southern European socialism in detail.