Social democracy and the 'Europe question': Lessons from Weimar?

Ankara Avrupa Çalışmaları Dergisi, 2024

The main thrust of this article is to examine the evolution of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands-SPD)'s Europhile position since German reunification from a broader ideological perspective. To this end, this study rests on the field research that entails 16 semi-structured interviews with highprofile SPD political elites and archival research on key official party documents. Based on this analysis, the main argument of this study is that the SPD encountered a growing tension between idealistic and domestic views of European integration since 1990. Under the impact of the post-reunification domestic problems and Chancellor Schröder's assertive European policy line, the German Social Democrats' ideology-driven doubts about European integration increased at the expense of their idealistic pro-Europeanism. Over time, this tension led to the greater prominence of ideological pragmatism in the SPD's official European Union (EU) narrative, rendering Europe a politically and ideologically salient issue for the party.

Studies in Political Economy, 1986

visitor to the Social Democratic Party (SPD) headquarters-the famed "Barracke" in Bonn-on the evening of 6 March 1983, could not help but feel a deep sense of destitution and gloom amongst the Federal Republic's Social Democrats,I Pipe-smoking intellectuals and hardened unionists alike conveyed the unmistakable feeling that the conservative victory on that Sunday in March heralded •

In Search of Social Democracy: Responses to Crisis …, 2009

This book chapter explores the development of the meaning of social justice in the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) discourse by juxtaposing the 1989 Berlin Programme with various programmatic initiatives by the party leadership and with the new 2007 Hamburg Programme. In order to understand the context in which the meaning of social justice changed, the article also outlines some of the social policy changes under Gerhard Schröder’s SPD-led governments between 1998 and 2005.

German Studies Review, 2004

2015

Political science literature has extensively described social democracy’s ‘two metamorphoses’. First there was the establishment of social democratic parties as major government parties in the ‘Keynesian State’ period and then their ‘de-social-democratisation’ after the 1970s, while the renovation promoted by Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder was associated with electoral success at the end of the 1990s. The propulsive power of this new social democratic identity was then rapidly exhausted. Until the last days before the 2014 European elections, opinion polls carried out in EU member countries allowed the social democrats to hope that they could pass the 200-seat threshold in the 751-seat European Parliament (EP) and make good the setback they had suffered five years earlier. Indeed, in 2009 only a quarter of the MEPs belonged to the EP’s S&D group, which was at an historically low level. We will first show that social democracy managed to stabilise its weight in the EP only while continuing to decline in percentage of votes. This result should be seen in the context of the historic trajectory of a political family of parties that we extensively studied in The Palgrave Handbook of Social Democracy.2We will next address the present state of this family of parties in the middle of capitalism’s structural crisis and the dilemmas it faces in the very peculiar regime of the European Union. The social democrats, because of their own history, have tied themselves up in a bundle of constraints — which are creating their present difficulties. For this reason, they will probably not be of much help in putting an end to the austerity that is devastating the European continent. This will be the last point covered by this article.

Knud Andresen, Stefan Müller (eds.), "Contesting Deregulation. Debates, Practices and Developments in the West since the 1970s", Berghahn, 2017, 2014

The chapter focuses on the approach of the Federal Republic of Germany Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to the international economic crisis of the 1970s. During his years in power (1974-1982), Schmidt took part in the newborn G6 (later G7) ‘club’ which promoted the deregulation of the international economy and more generally the adoption of a ‘neoliberal’ course. The chapter shows how Schmidt had been an active promoter of a more ‘laissez-faire’ oriented approach, which he deemed as a necessary alternative to the no longer productive Keynesian recipes. Besides, Schmidt estimated that only a renewed Transatlantic solidarity under US leadership could stand the challenge brought by the ‘South’ of the world and by its requests of a new and fairer economic order. Thus, moving away from the traditional tenets of social democracy, Schmidt’s approach ended up promoting a new ‘bipartisan consensus’ towards the reborn neoliberal doctrine.

Dissertation, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh, 2014 http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/22585/

Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft