The paradoxes of success. Dutch social democracy and its historiography

Abstract

Anniversaries of successful political parties, particularly if the birthdays are 'round' ones like centenaries, tend to call forth a barrage of self-congratulatory literature from political leaders, supplemented by scholarly analyses with varying degrees of sophistication explaining the reasons for the group's success. Remarkably, this scenario has not manifested itself in the case of the recent centennial celebrations of European Social Democracy, including that of the Dutch variant, the 'Partij van de Arbeid' (PvdA). Rather, the political leaders have written pieces full of self-doubt, while historians contributed what were sometimes bitter indictments of present-day European Social Democracy and its leaders 1. This is all the more surprising since, as Sir Ralf Dahrendorf and Klaus von Dohnanyi have recently reminded us, European Social Democracy was an unabashed success story; the Social Democratic parties have dominated much of the political and social agenda in Europe during the twentieth century. The reasons for the unease, as Piet de Rooy has noted, for the PvdA, lies in the ambivalence of the success story. Both the Socialists themselves and the scholarly community see the Social Democratic accomplishments tarnished by a nagging sense that the price for Social Democracy's political success was the loss of Socialism's ideological soul. Paradoxically, this now very pervasive self-doubt is of rather recent origin. Until the last decade or so, most analysts (not to mention Social Democratic political leaders) celebrated the increasing conjunction of the Social Democrats political and social agenda and their electoral success with unabashed enthusiasm. Kurt Klotzbach entitled his history of the 'Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands' (SPD)after 1945 Der Weg zur Staatspartei, and that proud boast would certainly hold even more true for the PvdA. In fact, if there is a Leitmotiv to most of the literature on the ' Sociaal-democratische Arbeiders Partij' (SDAP) and the PvdA, it is a certain historicist tendency to read into the history of Dutch Democratic Socialism a straight-forward evolution toward fullscale acceptance of the pragmatic reformism that was to characterize all of West European Social Democracy after World War II. Indeed, and not without some reason, the Dutch party is usually assigned a pioneering role in this story.