The Long Fifties: The Politics of Socialist Programmatic Revision in Britain, France and Germany

Abstract

After 1945, the reordering of international affairs around the ideological polarities of Washington and Moscow initiated for European social democrats an extended period of self-examination. Accustomed to a place at the centre stage of ideas on the evolution of advanced capitalist economies, they suddenly found themselves in a smaller Europe, the principal theatre of the superpower confrontation. At the point when it seemed only reasonable to suppose that the crisis of industrial capitalism in the 1930s, followed by six years of war, would at last bring a durable electoral majority to the cause of reconstruction under democratic socialism, both domestic and international politics were full of new ambiguities. The hope of the immediate post-war years gave way to uncertainty. That uncertainty, however, could not be attributed to altered circumstances alone. The fact that the decade of the 1950s turned out to be ‘long’ – involving electoral defeats to which there appeared to be no obvious answers – was due in no small part to the nature of the social democratic tradition itself.1