This book considers the underlying causes of the end of social democracy's golden age. It argues that the cross-national trend in social democratic parties since the 1970s has been towards an accommodation with neo-liberalism and a corresponding dilution of traditional social democratic commitments. The book looks at the impact of the change in economic conditions on social democracy in general, before examining the specific cases of Germany, Sweden and Australia. It examines the ideological crisis that engulfed social democracy. The book also looks at the post-1970 development of social policy, its fiscal implications and economic consequences in three European countries. It considers the evolution of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) from its re-emergence as a significant political force during the 1970s until the present day under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The book also examines the evolution of the Swedish model in conjunction with social democratic reformism and the party's relations to the union movement. It explores the latest debate about what the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) stands for. The SPD became the role model for programmatic modernisation for the European centre-left. The book considers how British socialist and social democratic thought from the late nineteenth century to the present has treated the objective of helping people to fulfil their potential, talents and ambitions. It aims to contribute to a broader conversation about the future of social democracy by considering ways in which the political thought of 'third way' social democracy might be radicalised for the twenty-first century.
In this book scholars from across the globe investigate changes in ‘society’ and ‘nation’ over time through the lens of immunisation. Such an analysis unmasks the idea of vaccination as a simple health technology and makes visible the social and political complexities in which vaccination programmes are embedded. The collection of essays gives a comparative overview of immunisation at different times in widely different parts of the world and under different types of political regime. Core themes in the chapters include immunisation as an element of state formation; citizens’ articulation of seeing (or not seeing) their needs incorporated into public health practice; allegations that development aid is inappropriately steering third-world health policies; and an ideological shift that treats vaccines as marketable and profitable commodities rather than as essential tools of public health. Throughout, the authors explore relationships among vaccination, vaccine-making, and the discourses and debates on citizenship and nationhood that have accompanied mass vaccination campaigns. The thoughtful investigations of vaccination in relation to state power, concepts of national identify (and sense of solidarity) and individual citizens’ sense of obligation to self and others are completed by an afterword by eminent historian of vaccination William Muraskin. Reflecting on the well-funded global initiatives which do not correspond to the needs of poor countries, Muraskin asserts that an elite fraternity of self-selected global health leaders has undermined the United Nations system of collective health policy determination by launching global disease eradication and immunisation programmes over the last twenty years.
economic sclerosis of the 1970s consequently offered the opening that the sponsors of so-called ‘neo-liberalism’ had been seeking to remake the political economy of the industrialised nations. The neo-liberals were remarkably successful at attributing the blame for the economic downturn to ham-fisted Keynesian interventionism, wasteful public spending and inflationary trade unions, and at offering fresh prescriptions for public policy organised around counter-inflationary austerity, welfare state retrenchment, privatisation and deregulation. The new world that social
1 Explanations for the neo-liberal direction of social democracy: Germany, Sweden and Australia compared Ashley Lavelle Several explanations have been put forward as to why social democrats have adopted neo-liberal policies since at least the 1980s. Ideological trends, the consequences of globalisation and European integration, and electoral factors, all get a strong mention in the literature. This chapter suggests that a more persuasive explanation for social democrats’ embrace of neo-liberalism lies with the end of the post-war boom in the early 1970s. Not
3 Neither Boston nor Berlin: class polarisation and neo-liberalism in the Irish Republic KIERAN ALLEN The Celtic Tiger is dead. Between 1994 and 2000, real gross domestic product (GDP) in the Republic of Ireland grew at an annual average rate of nine per cent, taking per capita income from sixty-seven to eightysix per cent of the European Union (EU) average by 1999.1 In terms of conventional economics, this would seem to constitute a miracle. Growth rates for most industrial nations were sluggish in the 1990s and even the boom in the United States did not match
attempt to reconcile social justice and economic efficiency. Alternatively, as Cammack sees things, Giddens has deliberately subverted the language of social democracy in order to usher in a new and aggressive phase of neo-liberalism. On his account, the Third Way is not an attempt to address the perceived failures of both the Old Left and neo-liberalism, but rather the ideological
derived exclusively from the logic of capitalist accumulation and exploitation. In contrast, neo-liberalism looks to an active state first to restore and then to maintain and extend the conditions within which the logic of capitalist reproduction can work to the full. In this context, an essential component of its project – reflected in the claim that ‘there is no alternative’ – is
grant neo-liberalism a hegemonic status. On this view, the Third Way is simply an elaborate rhetorical device that seeks to legitimise the capitulation of the Centre-Left to the triumph of neo-liberal ideology and practice. Giddens and other advocates of the Third Way have simply reconciled themselves to neo-liberalism. The Third Way is a project that looks to ‘adapt to the
Afterword: monstrous markets – neo-liberalism, populism and the demise of the public university John Holmwood, Jan Balon There is a crisis in the idea of the university. It has emerged from the application of neo-liberal policies which have reduced the public values of the university to instrumental purposes. This poses a considerable threat to liberal education (Brown, 2015, Collini, 2012; Ginsberg, 2011; Holmwood, 2011; Nussbaum, 2010). In the UK, government ministers and policy advisers seek a ‘cultural’ change directing academic research and student
response has been to actively promote economic liberalisation, to encourage free trade across national boundaries, to promote competition and deregulation and to incorporate more and more nations within this framework. In this way the Third Way has further established the approach of the New Right – or neo-liberalism. This has been the case at least for the historically more