適應或投降？社會民主在英國、法國與荷蘭，1973至1984年

Abstract

This thesis studies the transformation of three Western European social democratic parties - the Labour Party, Parti Socialiste and Partij van de Arbeid - during and after the oil crisis of the 1970s with the aid of comparative historical analysis. The literature on the subject indicates that if there was a social democratic political consensus in postwar Western Europe, the economic crisis of the 1970s discredited these ideas and enabled neoliberalism to take centre stage. Most social democratic parties internalised neoliberalism by embracing the Third Way. Social democracy today is undergoing a deep organic crisis as the Third Way has lost its mobilisation appeal - and this crisis is comparable to the one that ended the social democratic moment in the 1970s. The three subject parties’ tenure in government between 1974 and 1983 has been analyzed in case studies. Subsequently, the parties’ organizational composition has been assessed with the aid of Stefano Bartolini’s framework, their policies and proposals have been placed on the universalism -classism continuum proposed by the Laclau-Mouffe framework, and a link was made between party composition and a party’s adoption of classist or universalist positions, an under-researched aspect of modern social democracy. The findings show that parties that enjoyed strong link-backs to civil society adopted classist positions, were vote- rather than policy-seeking and discarded social democracy when it came under fire, moving from the patronage of one insider group to another with diminishing returns. However, the example of the Parti Socialiste shows that a social democratic party without civil society link-backs is more universalistic in its appeals, which has enabled it to resist neoliberalism and uphold classical social democracy of a policy-seeking bent, emphasising equality of result in its social policy and full employment in its economic policy. This is consistent with Laclau and Mouffe’s suppositions. More research will be needed to ascertain the extent to which a universalistic social democratic party can safeguard social democratic institutions in a country’s political and economic ecology.