German Social Democratic Party Research Articles

Apuntes para una historia intelectual de la Fundación Friedrich Ebert en América Latina

The promotion of democracy was from its origins one of the banners of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), ideologically linked to the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and which disembarked in Latin America in the 1960s. It is this transnationalization that we are interested in exploring from the perspective of intellectual history (Altamirano, 2005, Palti, 2004-2005), breaking with a unidirectional idea of transfers and circulations, in order to understand the exchange and connections between regions, ideas and people. The article first focuses on explaining the particularity of the German Political Foundations and the functioning of the FES in Latin America and then goes on to explore three intellectual projects of the Foundation, such as the Latin American Institutes for Social Science Research (ILDIS), the Center for Democratic Studies of Latin America (CEDAL) and the New Society Journal (NUSO). Based on the premise that ideas are important insofar as they conveyed meanings and representations in the region, this paper seeks to map the little known but strong presence of the FES in Latin America during the Cold War years. And how it became an important platform capable of connecting people, ideas and regions. In this framework, the FES, and this is our bet, can be thought of as an intellectual network that, while participating in and promoting debates on development, dependence, anti-imperialism, revolution and democracy, was building a space for indigenous social democracy.

Careerism and working-class decline: The role of party selectorates in explaining trends in descriptive (mis-)representation

Recent decades have seen a growing underrepresentation of working-class legislators and the parallel rise of professionalized “career politicians”, especially in centre-left parties. While this changing class composition of parliaments has implications for representational inequality, we know little about its reasons. I focus on the candidate nomination processes in the German Social Democratic Party to understand the priorities and practices of party selectors. Drawing on interview data with key actors in the nomination processes for the 2021 federal election, I show that the representation of marginalized groups becomes more important, but class representation is excluded from party debates. Although many selectors share the view that the candidates’ narrowing class backgrounds impede the representation of lower-class constituents, they see the reasons for this development mainly in individual obstacles beyond their control. Thus, while the nomination procedures disadvantage working-class people, they do so in a more complex way than previous studies suggest.

Red Banners, Books, and Beer Mugs: The Mental World of German Social Democrats, 1863–1914

Red Banners, Books, and Beer Mugs: The Mental World of German Social Democrats, 1863–1914

Pathways to social development: Rosa Luxemburg’s studies on the anthropology and sociology of imperialism

ABSTRACT While Rosa Luxemburg is widely known for her critique of reformism and political authoritarianism, less attention has been paid to her anthropological and ethnographic studies of non-Western and precapitalist societies. This chapter examines Luxemburg’s work on this in her Introduction to Political Economy and writings composed between 1907 and 1914 at the school of the German Social-Democratic Party in Berlin. In doing so, it compares and contrasts Luxemburg’s studies on the non-Western world with the late writing of Marx (1872–1883), especially concerning “the so-called primitive accumulation of capital.”

Intersectoral care: sector-linking approaches or ashifting of the sector boundary

The coalition agreement between the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), Alliance 90/The Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) states: "In order to promote the outpatientization of services that have so far been unnecessarily provided as inpatient care, we will swiftly implement sectoral remuneration for suitable services by means of so-called hybrid DRGs" (DRG, diagnosis-related group). More details are not known as yet. At this stage, another reform is surpassing the expectations that must inevitably arise from the coalition agreement, not least and especially for the care of internal medical conditions: The reform of Section 115b of BookV of the German Social Code (SGBV) and, thus, the revision of the catalog of operations that can be performed on an outpatient basis and interventions that can be performed on an inpatient basis. New additions to the catalog include inpatient-replacing treatments, which will likely move internal medicine into the center alongside surgical services. Following publication of the IGES report pursuant to Section 115b (1a) of SGBV and its initial assessments by the organizations involved, it is clear that there may be amixture of the two reform approaches. It is for this reason that the umbrella organization of specialists in Germany (Spitzenverband Fachärzte Deutschlands e.V., SpiFa) already joined the discussion with its own considerations 2years ago. It is essentially irrelevant to patients whether they are treated on an outpatient or an inpatient basis, and they are not interested in whether the physician treating them works in ahospital, apractice, or amedical care center. The main thing is that the physician is qualified, care is provided according to modern evidence-based standards, and there is competent emergency and complication management. This applies to all surgical services and especially to all conservative and interventional services in internal medicine. With these basic considerations in mind, the SpiFa and its associations have discussed aconcept that, in the spirit of the coalition agreement on the establishment of acare concept under the catchword "Hybrid-DRG", stands on its own, avoids sectoral boundaries, but can also be integrated into the considerations on §115b SGBV and necessarily goes beyond the boundaries of the catalog.

The programmatic reinvention of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the turn of the 1990s: A second Bad Godesberg?

En s’appuyant sur les débats idéologiques et les programmes du Parti social-démocrate allemand (SPD) de la seconde moitié des années 1980, cette contribution s’interroge sur la recréation d’un mythe fondateur et l’adéquation des idées social-démocrates avec leur époque. Elle porte un intérêt spécifique aux conditions de production d’écrits partisans, aux rapports de force nouveaux entre les acteurs et aux différentes temporalités qui présidèrent à l’entreprise de reconquête du pouvoir par le SPD, et à son échec, en 1990. Dans une perspective transnationale et comparative, elle intègre un questionnement succinct sur le Parti socialiste d’Autriche (SPÖ) puis Parti social-démocrate d’Autriche afin de mettre en perspective la transformation des social-démocraties germanophones à l’aube des années 1990.

Financial professionals and the formation of proprietarian ideology

Financial professionals and the formation of proprietarian ideology

The Comintern, Communist women leaders and the struggle for women's liberation in Britain between the wars: a political and prosopographical investigation, part 2

This is the second part of an article which explores and contextualises in revolutionary theory and practice the lives and careers of a highly unusual group of women, many hitherto hidden from history, who took a leading part in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) between 1920 and 1939. The first instalment discussed the historiography and outlined a prosopographical approach to the subject. It traced the theory of women's liberation which informed the early Comintern and its national affiliates from its roots in the work of Engels, the German Social Democratic Party and the Second International; outlined developments in CPGB policy on the question over two decades; and presented a statistical analysis of 15 of the 18 women who figured in the party leadership between the wars. This second instalment provides mini-biographies of these Central Committee (CC) members. It examines their origins, ethnicity, religion, education, occupation, previous affiliations, political attitudes and career in the CPGB. Recuperation confirms that the group as a whole embraced Communism as a break with earlier women's politics – including those with direct experience of the suffrage movement. They rejected feminism but exhibited little interest in Marxist theory beyond Comintern pronouncements. Committed to the party and the policies of the Soviet Union as it moved from Lenin to Stalin, they were practical organisers and agitators who, on the whole, respected conventional gender roles. They exercised the right to be politically active, even in the face of domestic commitments, and engaged in the general activities of the party as well as specialist work with women. But they offered no explicit critique of the family, prevailing sexual mores or the subordination of women members within the CPGB.

SARS-CoV-2 Prevalence, Transmission, Health-Related Outcomes and Control Strategies in Homeless Shelters: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: People experiencing homelessness (PEH) may be at particular risk for COVID19. We synthesised the evidence on SARS-Cov-2 infection, transmission, outcomes of disease, effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI), and the effectiveness of targeted strategies for infection prevention and control (IPC). Methods: Systematic review of articles, reports and grey-literature indexed in electronic databases (EMBASE, WHO-Covid19, Web of Science), pre-print repositories, institutional websites, and handsearching. Empirical papers of any study design addressing Covid-19 in PEH or homeless shelters’ staff in English were included. (PROSPERO 2020 CRD42020187033) Findings: Of 194 publications, 13 studies were included (two modelling, ten observational and one qualitative study). All were conducted in high-income countries. Random-effect meta-analysis of prevalence estimates yields a baseline SARS-Cov-2 prevalence of 2·14% (95% Confidence-Interval, 95%CI=1·02-3·27) in PEH and 1·72% (95%CI=0·31-3·12) in staff. In outbreaks, the pooled prevalence increases to 29·49% (95%CI=16·44-29·55) in PEH and 15·18% (95%CI=8·95-21·42) in staff. Main IPC strategies were universal and rapid testing, expansion of non-congregate housing support, and individual measures in shelters (bed spacing, limited staff rotation). Interpretation: Up to 30% PEH and 17% staff are infected during outbreaks of SARS-Cov-2 in homeless shelters. Most studies were conducted in the USA. No studies were found on health-related outcomes or health effects of NPI. An overview and evaluation of IPC strategies for PEH, including a better understanding of disease transmission, and reliable data on PEH within Covid-19 notification systems is needed. Qualitative studies may serve to voice PEH experiences and guide future evaluations and IPC strategies. Funding: No source of funding.Declaration of Interests: The review has been conducted in the scope of the German Competence Net Public Health Covid-19. JS is volunteering (without financial compensation) for a German NGO which provides medical services free of charge for - among others - individuals living in homeless shelters. He further reports membership of the German social democratic party (SPD). The other authors state that they have no competing interests.

The tawdry tale of Marx’s illegitimate son: new evidence uncovered in the history of a lost letter

ABSTRACT This article draws attention to a neglected aside in the debate over whether Marx fathered an illegitimate child. In 1898, Louise Freyberger wrote a controversial letter in which she claimed Engels had confessed on his deathbed that Frederick Demuth was Marx’s son. The letter, however, only came to light in 1962 when Werner Blumenberg first discussed it in his biography of Marx. Blumenberg’s revelation provoked an on-going debate over the plausibility of Freyberger’s allegations. Several scholars went so far as to dismiss the letter as a forgery, noting that it only existed in the form of a typed copy that Blumenberg had discovered in the archives of the International Institute of Social History (IISH). In 1963, Jacob-Peter Mayer published a review of Blumenberg’s biography in which he stated he had known of the letter in the 1930s, but few if any scholars took note of Mayer’s claim. In 2019, a copy of the letter in Mayer’s own hand was found among his papers. This article argues that Mayer copied his version, not from the IISH typescript, but from the original letter, which he had come across while working in the archives of the German Social Democratic Party in the 1930s.

“A New Way of Governing”: Heinrich Brüning, Rudolf Hilferding, and Cross-Party Cooperation during the Waning Years of the Weimar Republic, 1930–1932

AbstractThis article examines the unexpected behind-the-scenes relationship between the conservative Catholic chancellor Heinrich Brüning and Marxist theorist Rudolf Hilferding. This relationship is the starting point to understand both the politics of toleration and the political and cultural ecosystem in which this friendship came about. The German Social Democratic Party's policy of tolerating Brüning's conservative minority cabinet was hotly contested and has been viewed skeptically by political historians ever since. This article analyzes the mechanics of toleration through Brüning and Hilferding's relationship and demonstrates how Hilferding became the indispensable intermediary between the German cabinet and the socialist party. Toleration was a replacement political process in a polarized climate. A behind-the-scenes informal coalition that included the socialists, as well as the conservative cabinet, muddled through governing and policymaking with backroom negotiations instead of parliamentary debate. Although it failed, toleration was a last-ditch political strategy trying to preserve the Weimar Republic.

How the SPD Lost the Future: The Party’s Crisis as a Loss of Future-imagining

In 2019, a Der Spiegel poll asked German readers which party has the best answers to the ‘questions of the future?' Just two percent nominated the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), once Germany's party of progressive change. In this article, I argue that the party's malaise has been underpinned by a loss of future-imagining. The SPD has become disoriented ideologically, and structurally dislocated from swathes of its traditional constituency, because it has lost the capacity to imagine and pursue alternate futures. Whereas the SPD has historically been defined by the claims it made upon the future as a temporal moment belonging to the working class, conceptualised here as a ‘concrete utopia' as theorised by Ernst Bloch, the party has lost this creative impetus. A series of long-term processes, evident since the post-war era but escalating in the period since the SPD-led Red-Green coalition from 1998–2005, have reduced the horizons of the party’s ambition. Its acceptance of the post-Fordist liberalisation project is partially a product of, as well as a contributor to, this loss of future imagining.

Revising Democratic Socialism: C. A. R. Crosland and Pluralistic Economic Democracy

Revising Democratic Socialism: C. A. R. Crosland and Pluralistic Economic Democracy Gary Dorrien Democratic socialism, an idea boasting a rich European history and a slight American history, is making a remarkable resurgence in the United States. No democracy can perpetually survive gross disparities in economic and social condition, so the United States is witnessing a surge of democratic socialism, despite lacking much of a tradition of it. Social Democracy has created the world’s most humane societies, where health care and the rights of liberty are universal for all citizens, elections and higher education are publicly financed, and grotesque levels of inequality are not tolerated. The United States never achieved more than a modicum of social democratic decency, and now even the modicum is endangered. The surge for democratic socialism reflects a widespread recognition that neo‐liberal capitalism works only for a minority and that liberals do not fight for social justice. “Democratic socialism” summarizes what is lacking. But no movement for democratic socialism can afford to ignore the ambiguous history of the struggle for it. Social Democracy is battered and reeling almost everywhere that it exists. Social Democratic and worker parties are consumed by the battle to save the welfare states they created, no European socialist party has dismantled the culture of white supremacy in which it developed, and every Social Democratic party has been absorbed into the global capitalist system. Europe’s only national scale attempt to democratize major business enterprises, the Meidner Plan in Sweden, was abandoned in 1992, just as economic globalization threw Social Democratic parties on the defensive. Since then the historic Social Democratic commitment to economic democracy has been put aside. But economic democracy is precisely what the American surge for democratic socialism is demanding, in this case on elementary issues: universal health care, a $15 minimum wage, higher taxes on high incomes, expanding the cooperative sector, and turning the big banks into public utilities. Here, the European experience is instructive. Charles Fourier, in France, and Robert Owen, in England, propounded the original idea of socialism in the 1820s. It was to achieve the unrealized demands of the French Revolution, which never reached the working class. Instead of pitting workers against each other, a cooperative mode of production and exchange would allow them to work for each other. Socialism was about organizing society as a cooperative community. Soon there were many kinds of socialism conceived by Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Georgi Plekhanov, William Morris, Karl Kautsky, Sidney Webb, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, V. I. Lenin, and G. D. H. Cole. The founders blamed capitalism for all of society’s ills, but religious socialists did not, so there were Christian and Jewish versions of socialism. Every kind of socialism retains the original idea of organizing society as a cooperative community, yet there is no core that unites the many schools of socialism or democratic socialism, and democracy is as complex and variable as socialism. I believe that the best candidate for an essential “something” in democratic socialism is the ethical passion for social justice and radical democratic community. This ethical impulse retains the original socialist idea in multiple forms, inspiring struggles for freedom, equality, recognition, and democratic commonwealth. Democratic socialism, though linked historically to revisionism, is not another name for it. “Revisionism” names the periodic necessity of adjusting the socialist idea to real‐world circumstances. Eduard Bernstein, the quintessential revisionist, rocked the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1898–1899 by contending that Marx got many things wrong and the party’s Marxist ideology was less credible and democratic than its reformist practices. In Sweden, a similar watershed occurred in 1928 under Per Albin Hansson, who committed the Social Democratic Party to the Bernstein approach and built a political powerhouse. In Britain, the parallel benchmark came in 1955 when Hugh Gaitskell’s revisionist faction won control of the Labour Party, seeking to replace Fabian Collectivism with pluralistic economic democracy.1 Each of these revisionist episodes was a creative response to a stagnant orthodoxy and a blow to the conviction that “socialism” names something definite and credible. The British experience is especially relevant to the U.S. context because Britain has...

Social Democratic Party’s Electoral Strategies Amid Social Class (Re)alignment and (Re)mobilisation

Social Democratic parties have long been steady pioneers of European democracy, but over the past decade they have suffered a humiliating collapse. It is commonly asserted that European countries have entered a classless society. Subsequently, mainstream left parties adopted broad electoral strategies to appeal widely to the median voter, exemplified by the Blair-Schröder Third Way. Electoral backlash following the British and German social democratic party’s 1990s neoliberal shift, their approach to globalization as well as their handling of the financial crisis and refugee crisis have eroded their popularity. Subsequent frustration with the political establishment is exemplified by the cultural backlash thesis. However, a countermovement signified by postmaterialism and social liberalism calls for transformative social and political change. The two convictions clash on binary issues, exacerbating a righteous divide between sociocultural liberals and conservatives, recently popularized as the “anywheres” and the “somewheres”. This paper puts forth the necessity for social democratic parties to re-engage with the cleavage politics of today. This is particularly important as today’s cleavages are largely ideologically driven. Questions of electoral strategy, ideological positioning and mobilisation tactics are contested intra-party. Attention is paid to Corbyn’s Labour, whose move towards traditionalism at first earned electoral support, only to be discredited in 2019. In comparison, the German SPD embraced centrism in 2017 and were penalized for it. They must now respond and offer a strategic alternative following competition from the Greens and Die Linke.

Nationalism, transnationalism and European socialism in the 1950s: a comparison of the French and German cases

ABSTRACTThis article explores national dimensions of transnational interaction between the French Socialist Party (SFIO) and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the 1940s–1950s within a comparative framework. Doing so allows us to uncover why the French and German parties retained intensive transnational contacts with one another despite their disappointments with postwar socialist internationalism. The SFIO and SPD were eager to put a socialist stamp on reconstruction, European integration, and French-German relations. The article shows why transnational engagement with their cross-Rhine colleagues appeared the most promising path to do so. Despite lengthy conflicts on Cold War politics, the international politics of reconstruction, and, later, decolonization and the Algerian and Suez Wars, the SFIO and SPD successfully compartmentalized their differences by establishing an autonomous track for transnational relations in European parliamentary assemblies. French-German cooperation on matters of European integration yielded the period’s greatest transnational successes, including the establishment of the Congress of Socialist Parties of the European Communities. In the early 1960s, the two-track nature of French-German inter-socialist relations endured but structural factors eroded the balance of power between French and Germans needed to sustain the mutual satisfaction with transnational cooperation that had peaked in the mid-1950s.

‘No automation must be achieved without improving living standards’. The British Labour Party, the Italian Socialist Party and the German Social Democratic Party during the postwar technological revolution

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the connection between Western socialist parties and technological development during the 1950s. The cases of the British Labour Party (LP), the German Social Democracy (SPD), and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) let us to examine socialist perspectives in managing technological progress and in conceiving programmes and purposes on scientific research. This choice allows to understand two different aspects: on the one hand, the new pragmatism of socialist and social democratic parties, which was a typical trait of Postwar's socialist revisionism; on the other hand, the predominance assumed by domestic affairs in socialists’ vision, instead international topics. A very specific choice concerns the article's main focus. A large historiographical dispute has started to trace about Postwar Social Democracy's revisionism. Given such historiographical debate, this article firstly explores the behaviour and politics of the LP, the SPD, and the PSI about the the so-called modernization, a process which concerned the entire Postwar Europe. It also discusses programmes or ideas circulations about the 1950s ‘technological revolution’ and the agendas settled by socialist and social democratic parties to govern such global phenomena.

A People's History of the German Revolution by William Pelz

Reviewed by: A People's History of the German Revolution by William Pelz Andrew Donson A People's History of the German Revolution. By William Pelz. London: Pluto, 2018. Pp. 180. Paper $24.00. ISBN 978-0745337104. Like E.P. Thompson and Howard Zinn, William Pelz, who died shortly before this book appeared in print, was a scholar whose left-wing politics shaped his research. Pelz spent most of his career at a community college while being an activist in the socialist movement in Chicago. He was especially committed to issues faced by working-class students; for most of his career, fighting for the rights of the disadvantaged was more important to him than output of scholarship. Only in the last four years before his death did he begin to publish books. His productivity in those years was remarkable: a biography on the revolutionary socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht; an edited collection of writings by American communist Eugene Debs; a survey titled A People's History of Modern Europe; and finally the book under review here. The titles of his last two books were references to Zinn's A People's History of the United States. In the first third of the book, which covers the social history of German industrialization and World War I, Pelz liberally quotes autobiographies of workers describing their hard labor, bad housing, and mean bosses. In this narrative, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the savior who fought for the workers despite government repression. Pelz emphasizes that, already in 1914, working-class soldiers saw that the war was a swindle, and they had no confidence in their officers. Meanwhile, on the [End Page 383] home front, women protested for bread and peace. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the mass strike in the armaments industries in January 1918 were inspirations to German workers everywhere. This narrative sets the stage for portraying the German workers as tragic heroes. When the Kaiser abdicated, they tried to introduce social justice through mass protests and council democracy but were smothered by cowardly Social Democrats terrified of revolution. Pelz claims "there is overwhelming evidence that the SPD leadership did betray their members, the common people and socialism" (68). To support this point of view, he marshals evidence from many memoirs by people who believed the same. This literature details the brutality of the SPD in crushing the Spartacist uprising in January 1919, the general strike in March, the Bavarian Soviet in April, and the rebellions following the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. In the historiography of the revolution, this book stands out for recognizing the agency of women and putting war and revolution into their material, everyday context of hunger. It does not contribute substantial original research on either topic, but no other book on the revolution argues as emphatically that working-class women helped bring down the regime by their protests demanding peace. Few other historians have speculated that the revolution failed in part because women were "pushed to the sidelines" (128). Written in a plain style, with a clear point of view and a narrative made readable through the extensive use of memoirs, the book is a breath of fresh air. However, the sixty-six pages the book devotes to the revolution itself are one-sided. Few historians today would call the Social Democrats traitors, as the Communist Party and later the SED in the German Democratic Republic always held. In the end, this book identifies the "people" with the left-socialist working class. Farmers, artisans, white-collared workers, middle-class professionals, and laborers who supported parliamentary democracy but were skeptical of socialism—in other words, the majority of Germans—have no place. Pelz did not consult the foundational German-language monographs on the revolution by Eberhard Kolb, Peter von Oertzen, Wolfgang Elben, Susanne Miller, and many others. These historians drew upon deep empirical research to argue that, as Pelz indeed suggests, the SPD made missteps, such as rushing to elections for a national assembly before purging the army and bureaucracy, as the soldier and worker councils wanted. But these historians contextualized the decisions of the SPD: The party lacked experts to staff the government offices that were overseeing the...

The German Social Democratic Party's Merkelization and Departure From Brandt's Ostpolitik

The German Social Democratic Party's Merkelization and Departure From Brandt's Ostpolitik

McAdams, A. James Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (review)

SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 588 never fully monolithic. Was everyone a true believer? His approach also makes the terror seem too automatic and minimizes the personal role of Stalin in the tragedy of the Old Bolsheviks. But such criticism should not trouble Yuri Slezkine, who has written a book for the ages, a Pamir, an instant classic. Department of History Richard G. Robbins University of New Mexico McAdams, A. James. Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2017. xvii + 564 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Suggested readings. Index. $35.00:£27.95. This book is the first attempt to deal, comprehensively, with the Communist Party as a ‘global’ object of study. It is an ambitious attempt, for more than one reason. Firstly, this is a huge topic that spans almost 200 years of global history. Although the majority of this story takes place in the twentieth century, A. James McAdams traces the beginnings of the concept to Marx’s radical forerunners in early nineteenth-century Britain and France. Despite its inauspicious roots, McAdams points out that the idea of the Communist Party had produced at least ninety-five separate iterations by 1985, with 38 per cent of the world’s population living in states governed by Communist parties (p. 3). Secondly, not only has McAdams sought to condense the entire story into less than 600 pages, he has also attempted to render the often arcane ideological vicissitudes of this history of Communist thought accessible to the general reader. On both counts, this book is a commendable effort. To tell this story, McAdams straddles a line between intellectual, social and political history, although as the book moves forward the latter gains in emphasis. He begins with the establishment of the First International, charting the story of its birth amidst heated debates surrounding the issue of party organization and its relationship to activism. His argument here is one that is central to the entire book. Recounting the various shifts in Marx and Engel’s thinking in response to events, McAdams notes that the idea of the Communist Party was an inherently flexible one, with two ‘potentially contradicting agendas. […] One was based upon militant confrontation; the other emphasized organizational adaptation’ (p. 38). This flexibility, McAdams argues,allowedCommunistpartiestotakerootinavarietyofdifferentcontexts across time. He thus shows how the Communist Party in Russia grew out of the Russian populist tradition; how the German Communist Party (KPD) REVIEWS 589 emerged from leftist currents within the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the aftermath of the First World War; the war also provided the key background for the establishment of the interwar Hungarian Communist Party which would establish an ill-fated Soviet Republic in 1919. Although the Communist parties of Western Europe (and briefly, the United States) make frequent appearances throughout, McAdam’s focus is largely upon those parties which succeeded in gaining power and stayed there. He thus devotes much of his attention in the latter half of the book to the debates within the Soviet Communist Party in the interwar period, and the post-war era sees his attention turn to ruling parties in the Eastern Bloc, North Korea, China and Cuba. McAdams takes the inclusion of the word ‘global’ in the subtitle seriously, and thus the book progresses chronologically, analysing the respective fates of each party as an intertwined narrative. Local context is not ignored, however, for a central claim of the book is that it is the fluidity of the Communist Party ideal that allowed it to flourish in so many varying contexts, thus sprouting a ‘multiplicity of forms’ (p. 11). With his focus upon Communist parties in power, McAdams regrettably but understandably forsakes any mention of smaller Communist parties who either didn’t gain power or only did so fleetingly. Africa receives no attention, and we thus miss the story of how parties like the South African Communist Party or the Angolan Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola merged the ideals of Marxism with national liberation struggles. One glaring omission is Ho Chi Minh, a founding member of both the Vietnamese and French Communist parties. Vietnam doesn’t feature at all, despite the huge...

Liberalising Regional Trade: Socialists and European Economic Integration

The socialist contribution to the creation of the European Economic Community has long been overlooked and misunderstood. Existing scholarship emphasises short-term considerations in explaining why the French Socialist and German Social Democratic Parties supported a European Common Market in 1956–7. This article offers a new perspective by placing these parties’ decisions within a longer context of socialist views on free trade, tariffs and regional economic organisation. Based on fresh archival materials, this article explores how socialist proposals for securing an economic peace after the First World War continued to influence socialist policies on European economic integration in the 1950s.