James Joll - The Second International, 1889-1914

There are a number of reasons why it seems worth while to attempt a history of the international aspects of Socialism between 1889, the year of the founding of the Second International, and 1914, when the unity of Socialists everywhere, in which so many hopes had been placed, was shown to be a sham. First of all, as in any historical episode, there is the interest of the personalities involved and their reaction to the problems presented to them. For at least fifty years international Socialism was one of the great intellectual forces in Europe; and the movement included at various times people as striking and as diverse as Lenin and Bernard Shaw, Rosa Luxemburg and William Morris, Jean Jaurs and Benito Mussolini, while no statesman or political thinker could avoid taking it into account.

Secondly, and it is from this angle that the question has most frequently been studied, it is in the Second International that the Third had its roots. Its weaknesses and mistakes contributed to the rise of Communism; its doctrinal discussions were the link between the original teachings of Marx and the 'Marxism- Leninism' which is the official creed of some nine hundred million people today.

Finally, Social Democracy was a genuinely international force. It was believed that certain problems were common to the parties which were members of the Second International and that they could be met by common solutions. Thus the tactical behaviour and the theoretical beliefs of one Socialist party often had a profound influence on other parties; and, indeed, one of the main themes of the history of the Second

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International is the imposition by the strongest Socialist party of Europe, the German Social Democratic Party, of doctrines and tactics on other parties, notably the French, with, it may be thought, disastrous consequences to the whole subsequent development of French social and political life. Moreover, the Second International before 1914 represented large numbers of people all over Europe who believed that it would be possible to prevent war by international action against it; and the story of the failure of the Second International to do this is both pathetic and instructive.

This book does not set out to be a history of the Socialist parties of Europe. Nor is it a history of the development of Socialist political theory. For this reason very little is said about the rise of the Labour Party in England, and still less about the socialist movement in the United States. The British Labour Party has always stood apart from the other European Socialist parties: it has been fortunate in that the concept of the class struggle has rarely been applicable to day to day English political life; and it has been mercifully free from the squabbles about doctrine that took up so much time at the conferences of the continental, and especially the German, parties. The British Labour movement was represented in the International; the 1896 International Congress was held in London; individuals, notably James Keir Hardie, played a big part in international discussions. But the Labour Party was never revolutionary and never Marxist, except for minorities like the Social Democratic Federation and its later offshoots which had, perhaps for that reason, an exaggerated importance in foreign eyes.

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Indeed, a study of the Second International must be mostly concerned with the French and German Socialist parties and their interaction. It is in part the story of the influence of German Socialism on the rest of Europe, of French attempts to resist it in the interest of a different tradition, and of the final powerlessness of the German Social Democrats to prevent a war against France in 1914. Just as the First International had collapsed because of Marx's attempts to dominate it and just as the Third International was to end as a tool of the government of the Soviet Union, so the Second International was to succumb to the efforts, however well intentioned, of the German Socialists to impose their theories and rules of action (or inaction) on the other member parties. In the First International the tyranny was only doctrinal: it could have little effect on practical politics. But once socialism began to be the creed of mass parties, decisions about doctrine and tactics affected political development more widely. The disastrous effects of the Russian Communist Party's intervention in the affairs of other members of the Third International are well-known; but it could perhaps be argued that the influence of German Socialism on other Social Democratic parties in the Second International was nearly as unfortunate, retarding, for example, the development of a specifically French Socialism, excluding some of the ablest men in the Third Republic from office for many years, and encouraging a rigid Marxism in the trammels of which an important section of the French Socialist Party has been caught up to the present day. For those who like to see political issues in personal terms, Jaurs and Bebel can be regarded as the protagonists not only of two rival forms of Socialism, but also of two different ways of looking at politics.