1989, historic events in both Eastern and Western Europe began accelerating at a breathtaking pace. Three developments, each of which by itself would represent a major breakthrough, started unfolding ever more rapidly. All three, interrelated as they are, represent dramatic changes in the world political and social order established at the end of World War II. I refer, of course, to the collapse of the ideological and political hegemony of the Communists in Eastern Europe; the end of the cold war as we have known it between the Eastern and Western blocs led by the Soviet Union and the United...

The current prognosis for a continuation of the U.S. domination of Western Europe, and for that country’s ability to continue to shape the parameters of European social and economic policies, is considerably poorer than the prospects for a Europe, at least a Western Europe, dominated by labor-oriented and Socialist parties. The entire post-World War II Atlanticist cold war consensus is today undergoing a profound and probably terminal crisis and is in massive disrepair, in part because recent U.S. administrations have labored mightily (and, for all purposes, successfully) to weaken it fatally. This weakening was accomplished by acts of both omission...

For decades the stability of the post-World War II political and frontier settlements in Europe rested on a peculiarly ahistorical assumption of long-range political immobility in the very heart of Europe. I refer to the assumption that the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam agreements were set in stone and that no major aspect of their implied division of Europe into two blocs could be altered. To be more accurate, the divisions could not be changed without a major conflict involving the superpowers that were the ultimate guarantors of the stability of a Europe split into two spheres of influence (which were...

The dramatic upheavals in Eastern Europe resulting both from mass democratic pressures from below and long-overdue reforms and liberalization from above highlight the general crisis of the state “socialist” systems ruled by Communist parties.¹ Gorbachev’s acceptance of the desperate urgency for fundamental political and economic reforms has begun to transform the Soviet and Eastern European state socialist systems. To put it more precisely the reforms Gorbachev needs require a different international setting, a winding down of the cold war, and this has as a precondition the liberalization and opening up of the Eastern European state “socialist” politocracies. This precondition calls...

Social democracy, all its existing ambiguities and problems notwithstanding, seems destined, through a series of historical developments, to be the dominant organizational and ideological force in Western European politics for the foreseeable future. This in turn positions European social democracy to play a decisive role in developments inEasternEurope and the Soviet Union. This is because it is the existing model of welfare state capitalism in Western Europe that has been shaped in large part by social democracy, rather than some abstract neoliberal model of pure market-driven capitalism, and which will most directly influence the development of Eastern European...

Among the unavoidable themes in any contemporary discussion of the state of politics, particularly in the advanced industrial societies of Western Europe, is the relationship of the class-based, more traditional labor and socialist movements, to the new social movements.¹ The importance of this goes beyond the narrow question of the electoral and organizational power of the left; the social movements have become an important cultural phenomenon in industrial societies in general, particularly in industrial democracies. Social movements are one of the ways the important and often informal political mobilization of opinion and activity takes place within civil society. Given the...

While the early 1980s represented a kind of doldrums for the Socialist parties this was only in comparison with the major successes and hopes that had developed in the 1970s. The malaise was more spiritual than organizational. The decade-long rule of Thatcher’s Conservatives in Great Britain and the two most primitively conservative U.S. administrations since the 1920s were seized on by many analysts to illustrate a world trend. The trend was supposedly in the direction of free-market economies on a world scale and it was accompanied by a new paradigm: it was not capitalism that was in crisis but rather...