Paul Anderson reports on differences inside the Socialist International
It had been billed in the left-leaning left-leaning French press as the great showdown that would determine the future of social democracy, but as it turned out the 21st congress of the Socialist International in Paris last month was nothing of the sort.
Instead of a gladiatorial contest between French prime minister
Lionel Jospin and British prime minister Tony Blair – backed up by German
chancellor Gerhard Schroder – over Blair and Schroder's supposed capitulation
to “neo-liberalism”, the 1,000 or so delegates from more than 130 countries
were treated by Blair and Jospin to a fascinating but hardly spectacular
exercise in talking in code. (Schroder, under fire at home after a string of
disastrous election setbacks, sensibly decided to limit himself to platitudes
about the importance of building “an economically efficient continent but also
a socially just one”.)
Blair's speech in the opening session was a reprise of familiar
themes and soundbites. “The debate today is longer about whether we modernise,
but how and how fast,” he declared. “The left and centre-left has to stay true
to its values but rediscover fundamental radicalism in applying those values to
the modern world and jettison outdated doctrine and dogma that stands in our
way. We must take on the forces of conservatism, left and right, who resist
change – whether it is the right who believe that the knowledge economy is just
a passing fad or those parts of the left happy defending the status quo,
promoting tax and spend or yielding up the territory of law and order to the
right.”
The key to changing today's world, he went on, was to understand “the
sheer pace, scale and force of change: economic, technological and social”.
Social democratic parties should not “become conservatives of the left,
protecting vested interests and bureaucracies and old ways of working in the
name of social justice and actually causing injustice by failing to act.
“What I have called the Third Way, but in reality is modernised
social democracy, is to become the champions of change, managing change in a
way that overcomes insecurity and liberates people.”
Who precisely were the “conservatives of the left' who resist
change and defend vested interests he did not make clear, but there were many
in his audience who thought he meant them. His speech, with its “ten steps” for
“successful left government in the 21st century” – including “financial
discipline and strong, stable economic management', massive investment in
education, embracing the “knowledge-driven economy”, pensions reform and
stimulation of small business – was given a distintinctly cool reception.
By contrast, Jospin, on home turf, went down very well. He had
refused to sign the joint statement by Blair and Schroder, The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte, published
just before June's European elections — and unlike the British Labour Party and
the German Social Democrats, his Socialist Party had subsequently done well at
the polls. It had been widely reported that his speech to the Socialist
International would – at last – outline his alternative to the deregulationist
Blair-Schroder line.
And so it did – up to a point. “The superiority of the market over
central planning has clearly been demonstrated,” he said. “The market is an
instrument, an efficient and precious one.” But, he went on, “it is only an
instrument. It needs to be regulated. It must remain at the service of society.”
Socialists should not “turn the market into a value”, he said. “We refuse the marketisation
of society ... Capitalism must constantly be controlled and regulated ... To be
socialist is to work for more organisation and regulation.”
But if the difference of rhetorical emphasis between Blair and
Jospin was clear enough, it was difficult to work out what precisely it meant
in practice. Both studiously avoided references to specific policies – and both
happily signed up to a rambling anodyne declaration, passed on the second day
of the conference, on the challenges of globalisation.
In practice, Jospin's centre-left government in France has been as
enthusiastic for privatisation as Blair's in Britain. Both governments have
pursued rigorously anti-inflationary monetary and fiscal policies and have
given a central role in economic policy to education and training. Many
commentators have remarked that the big difference between the two is that
Jospin has to keep the left, particularly his communist coalition partners, on
board, whereas Blair does not.
So is there, behind the rhetoric, what the new chairman of the
Socialist International, Portuguese prime minister Antonio Guterres, called “a
great coming together of positions”? Not quite. However much the rhetoric of
difference masks convergence, one thing still stands out. Jospin's flagship labour-market
policy is the 35-hour week. Blair's is workfare.
