Ideology and Transition. European Social-Democracy Copes with the ‘Consolidation/Dissolution’ of the Postwar Years

According to a widespread interpretation, the present crisis of the social democratic and labour movement in Europe has its roots in the end of the so-called post-war “Golden Age”. At that time the movement proved unable to work out an updated political platform to cope with the structural character of the crisis. This essay adopts a longer-term perspective, considering the social democratic ideology as one of the declinations of the “multiple modernities” in the political sphere. In fact, the social democratic ideology was characterized by a specific interpretation of planning (with the invention of the “tradition of the new”) and a peculiar, two-phased “regime of historicity” (political struggle in the present/eventual end of capitalism). The essay claims that such fundamental tenets were progressively abandoned during the postwar transition, which presented new and unprecedented features [[non sono sicura che intendi features e non magari challenges]] for the social democratic and labour parties. Therefore, the postwar decades were not only the stage on which events unfolded, but indeed also represented a fundamental component of them, without which the timing and nature of the later social democratic decline would be impossible to explain. Transition as an interpretative category thus proves of essential heuristic importance in exploring the topic chosen.