Reconsidering European Socialism in the 1920s

Abstract

Until recently the standard portrait of social democracy in interwar Europe has been a canvas of failure. Whether the failure was tragic or deserved has been debated at length; even much of the analytical writing comes down to a tale of men of good will or of flabby principles defeated by an evil age or by their own weaknesses. A vocabulary of limited and lost opportunities characterizes this literature; in its terms the inter-war era can be logically divided at its half-way point. In spite of bright exceptions like the advent of the Popular Front in France, the 1930s are commonly seen as a period of socialist defeat. Only the years 1919-29 appear a real time of promise for the movement. David Marquand has put it well in his thoughtful biography of Ramsay MacDonald: 'Over most of western and central Europe, the decade ushered in by the Spartacist revolt and the murder of Rosa Luxemburg turned out to be the Indian summer of gradualism: the last chance for men of compromise and reason to shape their own societies and the international community in the optimistic image of reformist Social Democracy.' To a considerable extent this gloomy panorama of stalemate and reversal has been an insider's view; many of its authors were personally engaged in the socialist and labour movements. That it dominated the historiography for so long is a testimony both to their persuasiveness and to the impact of a European situation in which fascism and communism in turn undercut socialism's position. Now, however, four decades after the end of the era, new images of between-the-wars socialism are emerging, encouraged both by developments in research and by the course of events in post1945 Europe. The influence of events derives above all from the transformation of socialist parties in post-war Western Europe into