Western Europe's move toward political union in the middle of the 1980s took place after years of Eurosclerosis and its impact was only dimly perceived by most observers at the time. Chapter 1 by Volker Bornschier develops a novel explanation for this remarkable shift in Europe's political economy. In the context of the then fading lustre of the United States, the hegemon of the postwar era, and the seemingly limitless economic ascent of Japan, the path toward economic and political union represented Europe's attempt to remain a player in the post-hegemonic round of competition. The resurgence of economic globalization that started in the 1970s and a tighter closing of ranks by the European states are contradictory only at first glance. The first implies a shift in power between the state and the economy in favour of the transnational economy, to which regional integration is an answer, a new deployment of an old weapon by states. In the political world economy, first economic enterprises and then states compete with one another. On the other hand, economic enterprises and states are dependent on each other. The supply of state-based order and support as a locational condition and the demand for this by economic enterprises must be united in practice. Here, negotiations are the typical form of exchange. Chapter 1 suggests that the qualitative change of West European integration in the first half of the 1980s was the result of an alliance between European transnational corporations – represented by the European Roundtable of Industrialists – and the Commission. It is made very clear that this was the decisive impulse, the necessary condition to overcome Eurosclerosis.

With the passing of time, what was regarded in the last quarter of the twentieth century as a troubling problem of limited economic growth will appear as a period of turbulence and social dislocation caused by the transition away from the two-century-old cycle of the Industrial Revolution. This cycle opened with the slow erosion of the agricultural population and culminated in a similar erosion of the industrial working class, because, by the 1970s, in the early industrialized countries, pure manufacturing activities were no longer able to increase employment. A distinct historical period seems to be coming to an end, even if it will take some time before its full effects will be visible everywhere. Even then, however, this is likely to take much less time than it once took for industrialization to spread from the early to the late arrivals in the Western world.

In its various ideological streams, its political organizations, and its social and political battles, the history of socialism is linked closely to this two-century cycle. Indeed, its story, many would argue, now comes to an end with the closing of this period. The passing away of working-class politics, and of class politics as such, leaves open the question of how many of its aims have actually been achieved. This study takes a historical view of socialism and aims to reconstruct the steps through which a social conflict was translated and structured into a political opposition, how it developed its different organizational and ideological forms, and how it managed more or less successfully to mobilize politically its putative reference groups.

In this chapter, attention shifts from the structural conditions of cleavage structuring to the organizational and behavioral dimension. The central questions concern the relationship between organizational development and electoral mobilization; between corporate and political socialism; and between forms of interest representation and political representation. These themes are discussed along the two dimensions of organizational consolidation and membership mobilization. The former refers to the establishment and consolidation of specific political organizations into the corporate-group and the electoral-party channels, and to the linkage established between them; the latter refers to the capacity of the same organizations to mobilize individuals into such groups as trade union members, party members, and voters.

This perspective is important for three reasons. First, the levels and patterns of early organizational consolidation and structuring of the cleavage are instrumental in explaining levels and patterns of political mobilization. That is, organizational strength can be translated into both capacity for electoral mobilization and stability of electoral mobilization. Second, once a political organization achieves a certain amount of consolidation, it acquires relative autonomy from the environment, becomes an agent of mobilization of its own, and shapes its environment through ideological and organizational encapsulation and mobilization. In this sense, organization is a way of making the cleavage relatively independent of its socio-structural bases and of strengthening its own ideological and cultural distinctiveness at the same time. Finally, early organizational patterns and the relationship they establish between the party and the environment of corporate interests determine the latitude of action of the party's electoral strategies.

The power resources of the lower classes, and wage earners in particular, depended primarily on their willingness and capacity to act collectively in the market and in politics, that is, to create and sustain corporate and political organizations for collective action. This problem can be framed in terms of a collective-action calculation. Assuming the existence of a common group interest determined by a common social position, the historical sequences, the institutional setting, and the resulting political opportunities should be regarded as the conditions that shape the individual's cost–benefit analysis and therefore set the incentives for collective action outcomes. In this case, class consciousness is conceived as the capacity to overcome the free-rider problem in collective action.

The value of this perspective rests entirely on its basic assumption: the possibility of defining some basic or minimal common “interest” for the members of a given social group. This is especially hard when dealing with the long-term processes of formation and transformation of social groups. The fact is that interests, and therefore costs and benefits, cannot be defined unless identity is fixed beforehand, since the former are shaped by the latter. What is regarded as an unbearable cost with one given individual identity may well be seen as an inexpensive benefit with another. In Belgium, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the costs and benefits of any given collective-action choice of a Catholic Flemish worker depended on which of these three possible identities he regarded as predominant. In France, the same worker would not have been embarrassed by a possible subnational ethnolinguistic identity, but could still regard himself primarily as a Catholic or as a member of the working class.

The socialist movement was an outsider for the conservative or liberal groups that controlled the political system in the second half of the nineteenth century. To establish itself, it had to penetrate the system and it faced varying degrees of resistance in this enterprise. The ease with which it came to be recognized as a legitimate political actor and the barriers it had to overcome to achieve this status – in a nutshell, the pattern of political integration – influenced its electoral strength, organizational cohesion, and radicalness of stance. Thus, the extent to which working-class political movements felt they could pursue and achieve their goals and values within the existing framework of state and political institutions was shaped by the learning experience deriving from the responses of the dominant groups and established elite when facing their demands.

The goal of this chapter is to assess the European variation in institutional “openness” to the new claimants' demands and organizational efforts, assuming that political alienation was as important as, if not more so than, social dislocation and economic deprivation in setting the context of the political response of new lower-class claimants. I compare the earliness and the level of left institutional integration, concentrating on four institutional obstacles to entry into the dominant pattern of political competition:

1. The extent to which demands made by the political movement of the working class were met by the established elite and institutions' use of nonpolitical means of confrontation, that is, direct legal and administrative repression and harassment. In other words, I consider to what extent and with what efficacy the state, as an administrative and policing machine, was used against the rising working-class movement.

2. […]

To define what is “left” within the European cultural and political experience, scholars have come up with a variety of focuses. The connotation of “left” may be independent of any school or doctrine and may identify a position of loyalty to the original programs, to the statu nascenti doctrine, or to the spirit of the original creed. This conception justifies such terms as “ dynastic left” (liberal parliamentarians who installed Luis Philippe [1830] on the throne but later opposed Guizot in the name of the original manifesto); fascismo di sinistra (the original radical corporativist and anticapitalist spirit of the fascist movement, as expressed in the San Sepolcro manifesto of 1919 or in the punti di Verona); and “Catholic left” (linked closely to the original evangelical message of solidarity and egalitarianism and to the social doctrine stemming from it). More typical of philosophical analysis is to view “left” (and “right,” of course) as referring to patterns of thought and behavior that are embedded profoundly and permanently in human nature: “to become” versus “to be” change versus conservation; the ontological opposition between a right-handed and a left-handed cosmology. Another tradition is to search for the permanent value, or constant guide, of the left – the general principle that it embodies and that differentiates it from any other current of political thinking. The emphasis is most frequently placed on the value of “equality,” although this is defined in different ways. Finally, in a more historically defined context, “left” is a spatial location, originally linked to the position within the parliamentary hemicycle.

In addition to resting on repression and institutional closure, opportunities for socialist political control depended on the development of electoral-politico-parliamentary blocs capable of enforcing the political domestication of the socialist movement. Many studies stress the importance of early alliances among major economic and social groups, assuming that the nature of the political regime developed from the logic of the subtending socioeconomic coalitions. Instead, I place more emphasis on the logic that political coalition results from specific forms of political representation developed by the main social groups during the phase of the party-system structuring. In this view, large social groups do not make coalitions or form alliances unless they are able to develop forms of political self representation.

This chapter examines the class cleavage in the light of the process of structuring of the national party systems or, more precisely, structuring stable sets of coalitions and alliances among social groups and political organizations. Within each national context, I discuss the following:

1. Which other social movement, if any, preceded or accompanied the socialist movement and what its political nature was (antiestablishment, nationalist, popular self-representational, or merely institutional, such as the opposition of the Catholic clergy).

2. What cleavage issues were already politicized when the labor movement entered the electoral race; what kinds of political parties, if any, were already active in electoral and partisan recruitment; what political alignments and national coalitions were already established among the forerunners and to what extent these reduced the range of options open to the socialists.

3. […]

DIMENSTIONS OF CULTURAL HETEROGENEITY

Nation formation is the second macroprocess that sets the context for the development of working-class movements. In particular, the point of interest here is national cultural standardization. Although the nineteenth-century socialist movements were decisively characterized by their international character, that is, they were “anational” when not deliberately “antinational,” their successive history showed plenty of evidence of their actually being national movements that were part of and an expression of the formation of a national culture and identity. Where the formation of a relatively homogeneous cultural national context was lacking or weak, working-class movements experienced profound problems of organizational consolidation and spread of appeal. The heterogeneity of the class cultural environment will be regarded in this chapter as a crucial element for the successful establishment and consolidation of a working class movement and of a class left electoral mobilization.

A class and social group analysis of the political mobilization process rests on a model that links the formation of social position, the development of group solidarity, and uniformity in group political action. Socialist thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century clearly regarded any social (and political) identities that were not rooted in the social position related to the productive process as supra structural factors amenable to false consciousness. They therefore assumed that the role of such identities was deemed to disappear with time. This position is echoed in recent works that implicitly or explicitly assume that the pro-left party and organizational behavior of workers is normal and that only deviation from this pattern needs to be accounted for. In this sense, other political identities are the result of the failure of the class identity.

Industrialization and urbanization are regarded as preconditions of working-class political mobilization. These processes create and intensify the social problems and grievances of the working classes and lower classes in general; at the same time, they constitute the structural preconditions for these problems to become sources of organization and mobilization efforts. The resulting social mobilization gives rise to new social groups; it increases the self-awareness of those already existing; and it intensifies existing conflicts and provokes the explosion of latent ones. Linking social mobilization processes with the left's electoral mobilization postulates the following underlying causal chain: that the formation of the working class – in the sense of the creation and spread of given class conditions – impinges directly on the development of class consciousness, which in turn leads to the structuring of the class cleavage. According to this hypothesis, cross-country variance is to be explained by differences in the available proportion of potentially mobilizing voters, the latter in turn resulting from the quantitative spread and qualitative consequences of the formation of working-class conditions. This general hypothesis is the subject of this chapter.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

The belief in a relationship between industrialization, working-class formation, and the political response of labor is common to both historical socialist thinking and more recent post–World War II literature. However, the emphasis on what this means is different. The relationship dominated the nineteenth-century debate on the “social question” and was at the heart of the theorizing of socialist thinkers. Marx's analysis of the social consequences of industrialization implied the formation of a new type of worker in large, machine-intensive manufacturing, which he characterized as socially homogeneous, functionally interchangeable, and economically alienated, that is, “abstract labor” potential.

THE ROLE OF THE FRANCHISE

The social mobilization and cultural heterogeneity factors are related to the specific historical context and its traditions. It is unlikely that any generalized notion of “industrial society,” conceived as a syndrome of structural/cultural features, will help to delineate the contextual political responses of the early phase. Similarly, the inhibiting capacity of cultural heterogeneity on the development of the left is unlikely to make its impact felt clearly in the very early phase of electoral development. It performs better as a limiting condition over the long term or as a potential boundary for mature socialist movements. While the long-term forces of assimilation and standardization may ultimately create similarities and bring about a leveling of both the social structure and cultural attitudes of industrial societies, in the very early phase of mass politics the opposite is more likely: The contextual features of presocial mobilization are more important than long-term developmental forces. Therefore, in the course of this book, I will consider more context-related factors.

The development of political rights, in particular the right to vote, was the end result of a long historical process going back to the eighteenth century and was rooted in the development of civic rights. Civic rights developed primarily in relation to the market as rights of property, contract, unrestricted choice of residence and workplace, and so on. Civic rights also refer to the potential for associability in a society when they touch on freedom of faith, thought, speech, assembly, and association. The combination of these civic rights constituted the point of departure for the opening up of political public space and opinion.

In Chapter 2, the distinction between three different processes was argued: (1) working-class radicalization and revolutionary crisis; (2) short-term socialist organizational and ideological disunity; and (3) long-term communist electoral success. The radicalization of working-class politics during and after World War I, and in some places even before, was a generalized phenomenon, although the organizational and ideological strife and splits affected the national socialist movements differently according to the prewar divisions, the country's position during the war, and the socialist attitudes toward war efforts and governments. In Chapter 2, Tables 2.6, 2.7, and 2.8 have been compiled for comparative purposes, and a descriptive analysis of the level of fragmentation of the socialist movements has been made. Reference to these sections should be kept in mind while reading this chapter, which considers the overall interpretation of the long-term outcome of these processes. The explanation of the consolidation and the long-term electoral success of communism and the general constellation of forces that can explain the difference between united and divided lefts, require, in my view, a broader and more long-term interpretive framework. This problem is the central theme of this chapter.

INTERPRETATION OF COMMUNIST SUCCESS OR FAILURE

The modalities of the communist splits documented in Chapter 2 bear little relation to the more long-term electoral and organizational success of the communist movements, which instead requires a more general analysis. In three out of the four cases where communism made important electoral inroads, this took place in an unstable liberal–democratic environment. Due to the intertwining of the communist question with national integrity and independence, the party was banned in Finland for almost the entire interwar period bracketed by the two civil wars.