Book contents
- Futures of Socialism
- Modern British Histories
- Futures of Socialism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Plural Modernisations of the British Left
- Part I Social Democracy and the Challenge to the Nation State
- 1 ‘Keynes Is Dead, Beveridge Is Dead’
- 2 Industrial Democracy, Market Socialism, and Stakeholder Capitalism
- Part II Identities and ‘Modern Socialism’
- Part III The Search for a Modernising Social Democracy
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - ‘Keynes Is Dead, Beveridge Is Dead’
Modernisation, Globalisation, and European Integration
from Part I - Social Democracy and the Challenge to the Nation State
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2023
- Futures of Socialism
- Modern British Histories
- Futures of Socialism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Plural Modernisations of the British Left
- Part I Social Democracy and the Challenge to the Nation State
- 1 ‘Keynes Is Dead, Beveridge Is Dead’
- 2 Industrial Democracy, Market Socialism, and Stakeholder Capitalism
- Part II Identities and ‘Modern Socialism’
- Part III The Search for a Modernising Social Democracy
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores how ‘globalisation’ became a common frame of reference about the ‘modern world’ and the rise and fall of both nationalist and pan-European socialist responses. It is widely recognised that the ‘discourse of globalisation’ was a lynchpin of New Labour’s ‘modernisation’, and some scholars also argue that it drove the party’s capitulation to ‘Thatcherism’. However, this chapter reconstructs an overlooked source of the idea of globalisation in Labour: the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES), which underpinned the 1983 manifesto. It traces how, from the 1970s, Labour policymakers diagnosed a powerful new force – ‘multinational’ production and finance – which placed novel constraints on the socialist state. Over the 1980s, these policymakers went from attempting to reassert the British state’s sovereignty to trying to transcend it through European integration. The AES collapsed after the 1983 electoral catastrophe, while Eurosocialism failed to decisively shape Labour. Yet, these ideas show that the spreading idea of ‘globalisation’ as an unavoidable feature of modernity had many parents in Labour and originated from the party’s left as well as its right.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Futures of Socialism‘Modernisation', the Labour Party, and the British Left, 1973–1997, pp. 41 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023