Mock road signs go up near EU Council HQ in Brussels,when heads of government refuse referendums on new EU treaty,December,2007.Yves Logghe/Press Association. All rights reserved.If a spectre is haunting Europe today, it is not the spectre of communism or socialism. To be sure, leftist politics has never completely disappeared from European parliaments and from civil society. But it is no longer the sort of presence that needs exorcizing, more perhaps a shadow of what it used to be.
There are profound causes for this predicament, and some notable exceptions. But the general pattern is very clear. The left is either unable to gain the support necessary to secure power, or when it does so, it is ineffective in implementing progressive policies of any kind. Greece, Italy and France are examples of countries governed by left-leaning coalitions that have failed to deliver substantially along the lines of social democratic action.
An important question arises: what conditions would enable progressive policy to come about again in Europe? I want to suggest that these conditions are not primarily political but institutional. The left may have lost most of its former capacity to organize the working class. It may have surrendered some of its core values to third-way or related projects. But what if these are the consequences of a far more fundamental difficulty? What if progressive policies – broadly understood as a counterweight to capitalism – are unlikely to emerge in any of the institutional structures now operative in Europe, that is, nation states and the EU in its present form?
