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Title: Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 by Geoff Eley ISBN: 0-19-504479-7 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: March, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $37.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: The Left's Role in Making a Democratic Europe
Comment: This book describes the history of socialist and leftist movements in Europe from 1850 through today with the intent of showing that these groups have been at the forefront of the fight for democratic rights. It does this very well, especially when it concentrates on the histories of the Democratic Socialist and Communist movements through the 1960s, showing what both movements offered, and what each lacked. Its retelling of history also debunks a cherished given of some modern conservatives that the Communists were just as evil and dangerous as the Fascists and Nazis.
When it deals with the 60s and later, the book seems to get a little more fragmentary. The chapters are longer and less concise thematically. With so many movements, from the Green party through feminism to ecologism and gay rights, it's very hard to keep a single thematic thread and the book almost turns into a basic survey of various leftist positions. If nothing else, the book shows that the left has many sources and the fight for rights has not been easy.
My only problem with the book was that there seems to be a rhetorical undercurrent of yearning for "extraparliamentary" and participatory means of democracy. This idealization of small group and barricades politics seems to me to obscure a fact that even the author admits: socialist and other leftist calls for greater individual rights have been most successful in countries that already had some form of democratic government. As the author shows fairly clearly, in non-democratic countries leftist activity only provoked rightist extremism and led to authoritarian responses from whichever side won the power struggle. Consequently, the book seems to me to demonstrate not merely how the left forged democracy in Europe, but how Europe's democratic societies have been able to incorporate more diverse groupings of interests.
Rating: 4
Summary: An important contribution to European history
Comment: Geoff Eley, one of the leading historians of modern Germany, and a prominent academic radical, has produced a large volume on the history of the European left... Eley...pays greater attention to the pre-1945 situation, and more attention to Eastern and Central Europe. His style is more repetitive, and it flows less easily than his colleague David Blackbourn, his co-author on the seminal "The Peculiarities of German History."
Notwithstanding that, Eley's message is well worthy of repetition and study. On the basic point he is right. The Socialist Movement that grew in the aftermath of the constitutional struggles of the 1860s and 1870s was vital to the growth of European democracy. Here the democratic policies of Marx were crucial in contrast to the flaws of anarchism, which fluctuated between terrorist vanguardism and ineffective apoliticalism. Socialists helped organize the first modern democratic political parties, and they took the lead in supporting universal suffrage for both men and women against elitist liberals and reactionary conservatives. Communists took the lead in opposing colonialism, in contrast to many socialists, let alone many liberals or the self-serving cant of a Woodrow Wilson. This does not mean that Eley is uncritical of his protagonists. Aside from the obvious flaws of Stalinism, the Socialists and Communists fatally underestimated the role of women and encouraged a politics that depoliticized them and discouraged their political activism. This was bad not simply on principled grounds but because women in the 1870s and afterwards played an important part of the industrial and employment world and they could vigorously engage in political activities. Moreover, in doing so, the Left legitimized conservative and commonplace views on sexuality, the birth rate and the family that solidified the views of the Right. The Left's other major weakness is that while it usually, and understandably, avoided putschist talk, it failed to develop an extra-parlimentary strategy to compliment its electoral one. Again and again, in 1918, 1936, 1945, 1968 and onwards, its deliberately narrow strategies limited its options and its strength.
What are the strengths of this book? It is well documented, and the 93 pages of secondary sources are exhaustive on most topics. Eley makes a real effort to cover all of Europe. Some of the setpieces are very good, including a brief account of the Spanish Civil War and the 1968 Paris Spring. The chapter on 1960s and 70s feminism is very useful, and records a number of spectacularly condescending anti-feminist comments (when one Labour party official is told that some women want to set up a feminist study group he wonders why, what's there to learn about Lenin's views on lingerie?). He reminds us that Communists were not the sole obstacle of Left Unity in the thirties and that social democrats had their own sectarian tendencies. Thousands of Communists were interned or dismissed in the last days of the Third Republic, while Petain and Laval were at complete liberty. Occasionally, Eley draws a sharp portrait of his widely assorted cast of characters. On Ernest Bevin: "Incorrigibly authoritarian and anti-intellectual to a fault, Bevin was the archetypal labor bureaucarat, incurably hostile to rank and file activists and socialist thinkers alike, belligerently intolerant of democracy, whether on the shopfloor, in the general meeting, or in the committee room, let alone on the streets." On Francisco Largo Caballero: "Largo was a disaster for the [Spanish] Republic, strutting on the stage of history while its real chances were missed. A Johnny-come-lately of revolution...[he] struck the pose of revolutionary tribune after 1933, urging the masses into confrontations he had no strategy for winning."
Some disagreements. The fate of the Russian Revolution is not systematically concentrated anywhere; its degeneration is more or less diffused throughout the book. The 1936 French Popular Front gets much less space than the 1968 revolt or the Greater London Council. Moreover, Eley is not altogether fair to Leon Blum (devaluation appears as a betrayal, when in fact it should have been done earlier). Nor later to Alexander Dubcek. Oddly enough for such a European work, Russia seems to disappear from the book after 1991. Admittedly the nineties are not covered in much detail, but this seems to unconciously represent Russia's exorcism from Europe. At times Eley criticizes the Left for its condescending attitude towards popular culture and its somewhat unimaginative concentration on the classics. But the radical effloresence of 1917-20 and 1936, while often showing great artistic merit, such as in Eisenstein and Brecht, also had a limited popular attraction. Eley does not make clear how the Left could have competed with Hollywood or television, nor does he fully confront masscult's ultimately meretricious character. Notwithstanding all that, this is important book, which deserves considerable study and reflection.
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