Newsgroup: it.politica.pds
Titolo: OT: Per Socius l'italianofilo

A home for all European reformists - Giuliano Amato and Massimo
D’Alema :P
An open letter to PES 
 
date: 02 Oct 2002 
Dear friends of the Party of the European Socialists, 
Ten years have now passed since that process was launched which was to
bring us quickly to the seat of government in most European countries.
At the beginning of the 1990s, many critics – and not just the most
conservative – foresaw the rapid and definitive downfall of European
socialism. After our lengthy period of suffering in the Eighties – or
so went this theory – the collapse of the authoritarian regimes in the
East was to have consecrated a conservative hegemony in Europe and
buried any possibility of renewed consensus for the left. We are all
well aware that this did not come to pass. And we all remember, in
fact, that it was precisely at this time that the European left began
to find its footing again, according to the various national settings,
and marked a turning point in its own political programmes. This
rejuvenation needed to satisfy two demands in particular that were
then emerging in our societies: to guarantee social cohesion, in the
face of that new phenomenon which would come to be known as
“globalisation”; and to define a framework of incentives and
compatibilities to promote innovation in our national economic
systems. 
Cohesion and innovation. This pair of imperatives, adapted to our
various programmes, brought us into government during the Nineties.
None of us won by hiding behind a screen of traditional values. No, it
was precisely our awareness of the need to come out into the open that
helped us meet society’s demands. And it was the urgent desire to
innovate our own programmes that pushed us towards a profound
modification in our very identity. The operation of injecting liberal
culture in to the roots of social democracy led most of the European
left, to a different degree in different countries, to win an ever
broader consensus. It also offered a clear sign of our shared
commitment to make a quality leap towards European integration – an
integration solidly based on the continent’s political unification and
with the particular goal of the single currency. These were courageous
choices. And they allowed our political family to fight its way out of
the corner it had been hemmed into during the previous decade. They
allowed us to avoid the ultimate risk of political irrelevance. 
This is not the place to attempt a summary of all that was done – good
and bad – by centre-left European governments during the last decade.
But one thing is sure: we are now facing the end of that political
cycle. A series of electoral defeats – begun in Italy little more than
a year ago – has rapidly led to right of centre governments in many
European countries. Now our victory in Sweden and Germany has given us
new hopes, but the reasons of our defeats still requires attention.
Such reasons are numerous, and they are often strictly linked to local
contexts, yet a single thread joins them all together. It is the
left’s inability to respond adequately to the feelings of insecurity
and anxiety currently afflicting our societies. While in government,
we succeeded in balancing public budgets, modifying social welfare
systems (though not always in such a way as to successfully meet new
risks), guiding the integration process and much more. But we failed
to placate that fear of the future which has spread over our
continent. And that fear is linked to transformations in cultural
identity as well as to the less central role being played by
nation-states – that is, to those very processes which we worked to
develop. Yet the results of those processes – at least insofar as our
societies perceived them – caught us by surprise. Our answer to the
ensuing widespread anxiety was weak. Because weak was our ability to
understand and interpret the changes enveloping us. 
The European right did not provide a true answer to these fears, but
they provided the illusion of emergency aid. Unlike in the Eighties,
when conservatives in Europe and in the United States succeeded in
riding the wave of international market liberalisation, the right
today offers no strategic design. Their recipes are old (order),
regressive (bringing policy-making back to a national level) and
paternalistic (compassionate welfare). And yet they have succeeded in
filling a real political void, capturing a consensus largely based on
the desire for protection against the dangers of change. There is
something more to the conservatives’ European victory, too. They have
reaped the benefits of an operation launched in the second half of the
1990s, when the electoral fortunes of the European left had reached
its pinnacle and when the future of the conservatives seemed bleak.
That operation, sought especially by Helmut Kohl, aimed to open the
traditional idealistic and cultural boundaries of the European
People’s Party. It aimed to harness all the forces that opposed, in
each single European country, the political hegemony of the left.
Since then, the house of the European conservatives has no longer
rested on traditional Christian Democratic ideals, but rather on the
capacity to effectively counter, in each country, that consensus
enjoyed by European socialists and by the policies we were enacting.
It was an unscrupulous, but nevertheless farsighted, political
operation. Since then, as we know, the EPP has welcomed parties with
no Christian Democratic tradition (such as Forza Italia), but with
strong electoral support. And since then, alliances have been made
with openly populist and nationalistic parties on which many new
conservative European governments rely. The sense of that aperture,
therefore, went well beyond a bit of party engineering: it coincided
with the EPP’s explosion out of the corner we had forced it into, and
it allowed them to find its way into electoral favour. 
European socialism today faces a similar choice. We will not be so
unscrupulous, but we should be equally farsighted. Nothing tells us
that our minority status in most European countries, as well as in the
European Parliament, may not last a long time yet. The likely lack of
effectiveness of conservative policy does not, in itself, guarantee
that the consensus pendulum will swing back towards the left. It will
depend, as it did in the Nineties, on our ability to translate the
needs of our people and the ongoing changes in our societies into
effective programmes. But it would be wishful thinking to suppose that
that ability can be developed within our traditional idealistic
confines. Those confines have permitted us to achieve extraordinary
accomplishments, even one in particular which would have confounded
our forefathers: the civilisation of capitalism. We can legitimately
claim that the social order by which we abide today is deeply marked
by our political culture. And it is fair to say that we have played a
fundamental role in designing European civilisation as it stands
today. 
Nevertheless, this is no longer enough. We cannot be satisfied with
defending the status quo – as, after all, could no socialist ever
worthy of the name. And to succeed in eating away at the consensus
currently enjoyed by the conservative right we must take certain
unavoidable steps – two of which deserve particular attention. The new
dimension of our reformist vision and policies, for one, must be seen
in supranational terms. Not in the name of a generic cosmopolitanism,
but for the now undeniable fact that policy making has moved above and
beyond the national level. Reformist parties have paid the highest
price for this weakening of the nation-state, having previously proved
their ability to use that state as a powerful lever for enacting
social policy. But today, reformist politics must put its sights on a
supranational horizon – a level at which decisions are now also made
that directly affect the lives of citizens. And there is more: the new
supranational dimension calls on politics to assume increasing
relevance. In this new scenario, the alternative to weaker politics –
and thus weaker reformism, which certainly calls for more, not less,
politics – will end up being a reduction of rights and a further
worsening of that crisis over legitimacy into which globalisation has
drawn national governments. At the same time, the traditional picture
of socialist reformism as the political and institutional arm of
labour must be overhauled. While labour unions maintain their
strength, that link between social and political representation –
which for many decades constituted our very raison d’être – is fading
away. The causes for this break are many, but the foremost lies
perhaps in the “individualisation” of labour and in the consequent
transformation of social identities. It is indispensable, therefore,
that socialist reformism choose to represent the new features of the
working world, and that it succeed in satisfying the new as well as
the old needs that world expresses. It must therefore move to broaden
the spheres of protection, just as it must improve opportunities for
all individuals to achieve the fundamental goals they set themselves.
For this reformism to prove profoundly significant to our new society,
which is made up of innumerable distinct individuals, it must succeed,
essentially, in revealing a new understanding between freedom and
security. 
With such a daunting job ahead, we must remain serenely aware that our
great past does not, in itself, guarantee a bright future. Just like
ten years ago, we have no choice but to come out into the open. But in
this case, the push towards change demands more bravery. The
construction of a new house for all the expressions of European
reformism must stand as an explicit item on our agenda. In this house,
all political cultures that share our basic values, join us in our own
policies and oppose to the new European right will be able to find a
wider identity. All European reformists must unite in an enlarged
supranational political family. Not a temporary encampment, but a
solid structure which offers all cultures of political reform a place
to meet and design a sufficiently strong and convincing programme.
Where Socialists can meet with Christian Democrats – increasingly
uncomfortable in the EPP – or with the wiser branches of European
liberalism, or with environmentalists. 
The name we give this new family is not important in the least. The
power of our socialist ideas does not lie in our name but in our
capacity to bring those ideals that animate us to life. And those
ideals may be rendered impotent should we fail to fight our way out of
this corner. In this sense, our identity may indeed present a trap for
us should it keep us from garnering the strength of reformists that do
not call themselves socialists, or should it keep us from joining
forces to defeat the right. On the other hand, as we are well aware,
during the last ten years, the Party of European Socialists has
already undergone significant changes. Our family has grown to include
many former communist parties from Eastern Europe, who have
demonstrated an ability not only to change their initials but, above
all, to guide their societies through tumultuous transitions. We also
know how the effectiveness of reform outside Europe – just think of
the U.S. Democrats – is directly related to an ability to shed the
easy comfort of worn ideals and identities. 
What risks impeding our effectiveness, or even threathening our
future, is the desire to defend traditional social democratic
orthodoxy in the form and content of our everyday work. The PES must
rapidly broaden its horizons and open up to non-socialist progressive
reformists. We must take the initiative in a process that should – and
certainly will – meet interest and support in other European political
groups. It is premature to guess at the final outcome of this process.
But it will inevitably pass through a number of qualifying phases such
as the convergence of our work at the European Parliament or the
presentation of a common candidate for the European institutions. In
any case, this process will certainly contribute to restore our
political relevance and keep European socialism from ending up a
prisoner to its own triumphs. 
-- 
l'infinito attuale è la radice assoluta 
dell'infinito potenziale. Leftorium ©

 liberalism, or with environmentalists. 
Anche questa, piaccia o meno, e' un'esigenza innegabile. Pero' proprio 
per questo credo che sia necessaria una maggior conoscenza anche delle 
altre "famiglie". La polemica che abbiamo svolto nei giorni scorsi 
sull'Opus Dei mi sembra lo dimostri chiaramente. Non si possono 
affrontare i rapporti con gli altri filoni culturali se si ignorano 
anche le differenza elementari, e continuo a dire che e' una 
stupidaggine accostare cattolici di destra con i movimenti noglobal, 
oppure dire che il Papa e' il capo di questi ultimi. In questo modo 
oltretutto non si capisce come orientarsi nella costruzione di rapporti 
che devono essere selettivi, a meno di non voler proprio buttare alle 
ortiche la propria identita'.
Come vedi, non ci trovo niente di scandaloso nella lettera, anzi penso 
che discutere su queste basi possa essere molto utile.
Ciao
Socius