A historical analysis of radical left parties and movements in Europe spanning the late 1960s to the anti-austerity movements of the late 2000s

Organized as a series of tightly linked, comparative assessments, Mapping the West European Left provides a guide to the state of the left in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain. While all the essays are detailed historical compositions-setting recent crises and dilemmas in a longer perspective reaching back into the postwar settlement-they articulate original insights into the contemporary political conjuncture. Why did Swedish social democracy lose hegemony and direction while its Norwegian counterpart showed unexpected resilience? What was the background to the Danish rebellion against Maastricht? What are the prospects for the SPD and the Greens in post-unification Germany? Should the British Labour Party embrace electoral reform? What propelled the French Socialist Party from triumph to disaster? And why did the Italian left fail to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of the Christian Democrats? Behind the questions explored by the contributors to Mapping the West European Left lie deeper issues concerning the future of radical politics in Europe after the repudiation of Keynesianism and the end of communism. With the individual country analyses synthesized by the editors in a concise and comprehensive introductory essay, this book provides key pointers to the social forces and ideological platforms that offer lines of advance to the left today.

Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for reform from within. In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. He contends that the EU’s response to the Eurozone crisis represents the ultimate transformation of the union into a neoliberal citadel that institutionally embeds austerity, privatization, and wage cuts. Concurrently, the rise of German hegemony has divided the EU into an unstable core and dependent peripheries. These related developments make the EU impervious to meaningful reform. The solution is therefore a direct challenge to the EU project that stresses popular and national sovereignty as preconditions for true internationalist socialism. Lapavitsas’s powerful manifesto for a left opposition to the EU upends the wishful thinking that often characterizes the debate and will be a challenging read for all on the Left interested in the future of Europe.

Hudson explores the development of communists and other left forces, charting their survival and renewal after 1989. She shows how an open and democratic form of socialism has emerged which embraces environmental, gender and anti-war politics.

The Strange Death of Marxism seeks to refute certain misconceptions about the current European Left and its relation to Marxist and Marxist-Leninist parties that existed in the recent past. Among the misconceptions that the book treats critically and in detail is that the Post-Marxist Left (a term the book uses to describe this phenomenon) springs from a distinctly Marxist tradition of thought and that it represents an unqualified rejection of American capitalist values and practices. Three distinctive features of the book are the attempts to dissociate the present European Left from Marxism, the presentation of this Left as something that developed independently of the fall of the Soviet empire, and the emphasis on the specifically American roots of the European Left. Gottfried examines the multicultural orientation of this Left and concludes that it has little or nothing to do with Marxism as an economic-historical theory. It does, however, owe a great deal to American social engineering and pluralist ideology and to the spread of American thought and political culture to Europe. American culture and American political reform have foreshadowed related developments in Europe by years or even whole decades. Contrary to the impression that the United States has taken antibourgeois attitudes from Europeans, the author argues exactly the opposite. Since the end of World War II, Europe has lived in the shadow of an American empire that has affected the Old World, including its self-described anti-Americans. Gottfried believes that this influence goes back to who reads or watches whom more than to economic and military disparities. It is the awareness of American cultural as well as material dominance that fuels the anti-Americanism that is particularly strong on the European Left. That part of the European spectrum has, however, reproduced in a more extreme form what began as an American leap into multiculturalism. Hostility toward America, however, can be transformed quickly into extreme affection for the United States, which occurred during the Clinton administration and during the international efforts to bring a multicultural society to the Balkans. Clearly written and well conceived, The Strange Death of Marxism will be of special interest to political scientists, historians of contemporary Europe, and those critical of multicultural trends, particularly among Euro-American conservatives.

In an in-depth comparative analysis, Stefano Bartolini studies the history of socialism and working-class politics in Western Europe. While examining the social contexts, organizational structures, and political developments of thirteen socialist experiences from the 1860s to the 1980s, he reconstructs the steps through which social conflict was translated and structured into an opposition, as well as how it developed its different organizational and ideological forms, and how it managed more or less successfully to mobilize its reference groups politically.

Millions passionately desire a viable alternative to austerity and neoliberalism, but they are sceptical of traditional leftist top-down state solutions. In this urgent polemic, Hilary Wainwright argues that this requires a new politics for the left that comes from the bottom up, based on participatory democracy and the everyday knowledge and creativity of each individual. Political leadership should be about facilitation and partnership, not expert domination or paternalistic rule. Wainwright uses lessons from recent movements and experiments to build a radical future vision that will be an inspiration for activists and radicals everywhere.