Dear friends of the Party of the European Socialists,
Ten years have now passed since that process was launched which was to bring us quickly to the seat of government in most European countries. At the beginning of the 1990s, many critics - and not just the most conservative - foresaw the rapid and definitive downfall of European socialism. After our lengthy period of suffering in the Eighties - or so went this theory - the collapse of the authoritarian regimes in the East was to have consecrated a conservative hegemony in Europe and buried any possibility of renewed consensus for the left. We are all well aware that this did not come to pass. And we all remember, in fact, that it was precisely at this time that the European left began to find its footing again, according to the various national settings, and marked a turning point in its own political programmes. This rejuvenation needed to satisfy two demands in particular that were then emerging in our societies: to guarantee social cohesion, in the face of that new phenomenon which would come to be known as 'globalisation'; and to define a framework of incentives and compatibilities to promote innovation in our national economic systems.
Cohesion and innovation. This pair of imperatives, adapted to our various programmes, brought us into government during the Nineties. None of us won by hiding behind a screen of traditional values. No, it was precisely our awareness of the need to come out into the open that helped us meet society's demands. And it was the urgent desire to innovate our own programmes that pushed us towards a profound modification in our very identity. The operation of injecting liberal culture in to the roots of social democracy led most of the European left, to a different degree in different countries, to win an ever broader consensus. It also offered a clear sign of our shared commitment to make a quality leap towards European integration - an integration solidly based on the continent's political unification and with the particular goal of the single currency. These were courageous choices. And they allowed our political family to fight its way out of the corner it had been hemmed into during the previous decade. They allowed us to avoid the ultimate risk of political irrelevance.
This is not the place to attempt a summary of all that was done - good and bad - by centre-left European governments during the last decade. But one thing is sure: we are now facing the end of that political cycle. A series of electoral defeats - begun in Italy little more than a year ago - has rapidly led to right of centre governments in many European countries. Now our victory in Sweden and Germany has given us new hopes, but the reasons of our defeats still requires attention. Such reasons are numerous, and they are often strictly linked to local contexts, yet a single thread joins them all together. It is the left's inability to respond adequately to the feelings of insecurity and anxiety currently afflicting our societies. While in government, we succeeded in balancing public budgets, modifying social welfare systems (though not always in such a way as to successfully meet new risks), guiding the integration process and much more. But we failed to placate that fear of the future which has spread over our continent. And that fear is linked to transformations in cultural identity as well as to the less central role being played by nation-states - that is, to those very processes which we worked to develop. Yet the results of those processes - at least insofar as our societies perceived them - caught us by surprise. Our answer to the ensuing widespread anxiety was weak. Because weak was our ability to understand and interpret the changes enveloping us.
The European right did not provide a true answer to these fears, but they provided the illusion of emergency aid. Unlike in the Eighties, when conservatives in Europe and in the United States succeeded in riding the wave of international market liberalisation, the right today offers no strategic design. Their recipes are old (order), regressive (bringing policy-making back to a national level) and paternalistic (compassionate welfare). And yet they have succeeded in filling a real political void, capturing a consensus largely based on the desire for protection against the dangers of change. There is something more to the conservatives' European victory, too. They have reaped the benefits of an operation launched in the second half of the 1990s, when the electoral fortunes of the European left had reached its pinnacle and when the future of the conservatives seemed bleak. That operation, sought especially by Helmut Kohl, aimed to open the traditional idealistic and cultural boundaries of the European People's Party. It aimed to harness all the forces that opposed, in each single European country, the political hegemony of the left. Since then, the house of the European conservatives has no longer rested on traditional Christian Democratic ideals, but rather on the capacity to effectively counter, in each country, that consensus enjoyed by European socialists and by the policies we were enacting. It was an unscrupulous, but nevertheless farsighted, political operation. Since then, as we know, the EPP has welcomed parties with no Christian Democratic tradition (such as Forza Italia), but with strong electoral support. And since then, alliances have been made with openly populist and nationalistic parties on which many new conservative European governments rely. The sense of that aperture, therefore, went well beyond a bit of party engineering: it coincided with the EPP's explosion out of the corner we had forced it into, and it allowed them to find its way into electoral favour.
European socialism today faces a similar choice. We will not be so unscrupulous, but we should be equally farsighted. Nothing tells us that our minority status in most European countries, as well as in the European Parliament, may not last a long time yet. The likely lack of effectiveness of conservative policy does not, in itself, guarantee that the consensus pendulum will swing back towards the left. It will depend, as it did in the Nineties, on our ability to translate the needs of our people and the ongoing changes in our societies into effective programmes. But it would be wishful thinking to suppose that that ability can be developed within our traditional idealistic confines. Those confines have permitted us to achieve extraordinary accomplishments, even one in particular which would have confounded our forefathers: the civilisation of capitalism. We can legitimately claim that the social order by which we abide today is deeply marked by our political culture. And it is fair to say that we have played a fundamental role in designing European civilisation as it stands today.
Nevertheless, this is no longer enough. We cannot be satisfied with defending the status quo - as, after all, could no socialist ever worthy of the name. And to succeed in eating away at the consensus currently enjoyed by the conservative right we must take certain unavoidable steps - two of which deserve particular attention. The new dimension of our reformist vision and policies, for one, must be seen in supranational terms. Not in the name of a generic cosmopolitanism, but for the now undeniable fact that policy making has moved above and beyond the national level. Reformist parties have paid the highest price for this weakening of the nation-state, having previously proved their ability to use that state as a powerful lever for enacting social policy. But today, reformist politics must put its sights on a supranational horizon - a level at which decisions are now also made that directly affect the lives of citizens. And there is more: the new supranational dimension calls on politics to assume increasing relevance. In this new scenario, the alternative to weaker politics - and thus weaker reformism, which certainly calls for more, not less, politics - will end up being a reduction of rights and a further worsening of that crisis over legitimacy into which globalisation has drawn national governments. At the same time, the traditional picture of socialist reformism as the political and institutional arm of labour must be overhauled. While labour unions maintain their strength, that link between social and political representation - which for many decades constituted our very raison d'āŠtre - is fading away. The causes for this break are many, but the foremost lies perhaps in the 'individualisation' of labour and in the consequent transformation of social identities. It is indispensable, therefore, that socialist reformism choose to represent the new features of the working world, and that it succeed in satisfying the new as well as the old needs that world expresses. It must therefore move to broaden the spheres of protection, just as it must improve opportunities for all individuals to achieve the fundamental goals they set themselves. For this reformism to prove profoundly significant to our new society, which is made up of innumerable distinct individuals, it must succeed, essentially, in revealing a new understanding between freedom and security.
With such a daunting job ahead, we must remain serenely aware that our great past does not, in itself, guarantee a bright future. Just like ten years ago, we have no choice but to come out into the open. But in this case, the push towards change demands more bravery. The construction of a new house for all the expressions of European reformism must stand as an explicit item on our agenda. In this house, all political cultures that share our basic values, join us in our own policies and oppose to the new European right will be able to find a wider identity. All European reformists must unite in an enlarged supranational political family. Not a temporary encampment, but a solid structure which offers all cultures of political reform a place to meet and design a sufficiently strong and convincing programme. Where Socialists can meet with Christian Democrats - increasingly uncomfortable in the EPP - or with the wiser branches of European liberalism, or with environmentalists.
The name we give this new family is not important in the least. The power of our socialist ideas does not lie in our name but in our capacity to bring those ideals that animate us to life. And those ideals may be rendered impotent should we fail to fight our way out of this corner. In this sense, our identity may indeed present a trap for us should it keep us from garnering the strength of reformists that do not call themselves socialists, or should it keep us from joining forces to defeat the right. On the other hand, as we are well aware, during the last ten years, the Party of European Socialists has already undergone significant changes. Our family has grown to include many former communist parties from Eastern Europe, who have demonstrated an ability not only to change their initials but, above all, to guide their societies through tumultuous transitions. We also know how the effectiveness of reform outside Europe - just think of the U.S. Democrats - is directly related to an ability to shed the easy comfort of worn ideals and identities.
What risks impeding our effectiveness, or even threathening our future, is the desire to defend traditional social democratic orthodoxy in the form and content of our everyday work. The PES must rapidly broaden its horizons and open up to non-socialist progressive reformists. We must take the initiative in a process that should - and certainly will - meet interest and support in other European political groups. It is premature to guess at the final outcome of this process. But it will inevitably pass through a number of qualifying phases such as the convergence of our work at the European Parliament or the presentation of a common candidate for the European institutions. In any case, this process will certainly contribute to restore our political relevance and keep European socialism from ending up a prisoner to its own triumphs.
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