The purpose of this issue is to explore the possible political futures of parties and movements of the “democratic left” in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the European Union, Poland, and Russia. The task could not proceed without clear definition, or definitions, of the “democratic left” because of national variations. There is “liberalism” or “progressivism” in the United States of many hues, but with no “social democracy” or politically viable socialism to the left. Socialism, in the old sense, of ownership of the means of production, has died in Britain, and the present government of “New Labour” refers to itself as the “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism. But there is much controversy at home whether “social democracy” has been also jettisoned in favor of a kind of “neoliberalism” that has embraced markets and trimmed social security. The large, democratic parties of the left in France and Germany derive from traditions of “social democracy” that have challenged many capitalist values and institutions, whether from Marxist or non-Marxist perspectives, and sought to establish a state and society organized around principles of social justice. These parties may win national elections but are torn between old left politics and the need to form larger coalitions in order to win. One might ask, Why include Poland and Russia? The purpose was to ask if new democratic forms of “social democracy” could be discerned in the ashes of defunct communist systems that might bear some resemblance to the politics of Western Europe.

Historians historicize. They attempt to understand the present and make educated guesses about the future by looking to the past. This attempt at prognosticating “the future of the democratic left” primarily in the United States begins with a broad-brush history of “the left” as equalitarian idea and political movement in the modern world, examines its development in the United States within a context of “American exceptionalism,” discusses its transformation in the 1960s, and assays its struggles in the “present day” of the last three decades. A once-revolutionary impulse, it suggests, has surrendered to the necessity of incremental entitlement politics. As a result, it has subjected itself to the hazards of the pragmatic test, the awkwardness of interest-group politics, and the distinct possibility that even success in the quest for universal social provision would fail to alter existing patterns of inequality.

On 9 April 1992, the British Labour party lost its fourth successive general election. The outcome, coming after prolonged economic difficulties, led many commentators to call into question altogether the viability of the reformist project in the United Kingdom. For Labour's leaders, the result was bitterly disappointing. To lose any general election is, of course, evidence of failure. But, given the extent of the radical transformation the party appeared to have undergone in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to lose in the propitious circumstances of 1992 was especially frustrating. Just over five years later, however, much of the period under a new leader, Tony Blair, and having undergone further dramatic adaptation, including a comprehensive rebranding as “New Labour,” the party not only took office at the general election of 1 May 1997 but won a landslide victory of 179 seats. A little over four years later it won a second landslide victory with a majority just 12 seats fewer at 167: it was an unparalleled achievement in the party's history.

In 1997 the French Socialist party, in alliance with the small parties of the Communists, Verts (left-wing ecologists), Citizens' Movement, and Radical Socialists (the so-called plural left), won a narrow victory defeating the President's party, the failing government and its beleaguered prime minister. In June, the left formed a government under its leader, Lionel Jospin, and included ministers from all of the formations. Its victory was unexpected as in 1993 the Socialist party had suffered a near obliteration and the conservative right had won a landslide, but it had revived at the 1995 presidential elections, when it ran Lionel Jospin, and steadily—though not spectacularly—revived after that. However, the victory in 1997 was more the result of the conservative right's divisions, an unpopular government, the hostility of the Front National, and the spectacular miscalculations of the neo-Gaullist President Jacques Chirac than to the prowess of the renewed Socialist party.

Public opinion data gathered from the latest surveys on Germany's upcoming parliamentary elections have turned out to be disheartening for the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Without exception, the Social Democrats take second place and lag behind the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) by several percentage points (Fig. 1). Today, only a few months before the next parliamentary election, a repetition of the electoral victory to the extent of 1998 seems to be rather unlikely. We are therefore faced with the perplexing question of how the SPD could arrive at such a disadvantageous position given the historic electoral success of 1998, when the party achieved its second-best result at parliamentary elections since Word War II. Is the SPD powerless against a strong tendency of the German electorate to cast its ballot in favor of the CDU/CSU, which has pervaded almost the entire history of the Federal Republic of Germany and has been described as “a permanent discrimination of the SPD against the CDU/CSU in the competition of parties.” Or is this situation just a snapshot without deeper consequences for the party?

In the parliamentary elections of 2001, Poland's ex-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) won more than three times the number of votes than any other party, registering its best result since 1989 and simultaneously delivering a crushing blow to the ruling Solidarity-led coalition, which not only lost power but also failed to win any seats in the lower house of parliament. If at the time of communism's collapse someone had gazed into a crystal ball and predicted that Solidarity's heirs would suffer from almost continuous disarray and the SLD would emerge as the country's most successful political party, he would have been dismissed as a crank. For a number of reasons, ranging from the country's strong religious traditions, to a political culture that saw the communist system and its servants as a basically alien force, to a long history of political contestation of communism, culminating in the rise of the Solidarity movement in 1980, Poland was the one East European country in which such a result must have seemed particularly unlikely. Further, given Poland's singularly dismal economic performance under communist rule (hardly conducive to nostalgic feelings), as well as the country's relative success with market reforms in the 1990s, one could not easily explain the ex-communist left's electoral gains as simply the result of a backlash against the consequences of economic transition.

Most discussions regarding the fate of the democratic left in Europe focus on individual parties in national political systems. Beyond this level, individual political figures have strode across the (West) European stage symbolizing the principles and values of social democracy; one thinks, for example, of Willy Brandt or Olaf Palme. By and large, though, when the health of the democratic left is assessed, it is done so by counting the number of parties in European governments. This “counting game” does not evaluate the ideological attraction of these parties, but rests solely on the outcomes of competitive elections, which does not necessarily attest to the popularity of the winning party, and in many cases reflects on the deeds of the incumbent party. Nevertheless, the main point is that measuring the prospects for the democratic left has always implied a focus on the individual national political system. At the beginning of the twentieth-first century, it is now possible to speak of an emerging European left, that is, a political presence representing a common set of issue preferences actively trying to influence the decision-making process of the European Union. One of the organizational nodes of this political presence is the Party of European Socialists (PES). This essay aims to explore the PES—its background, organizational development, and capability to influence the challenges to social democracy. The attempt to form a European-level social democracy represents one of the possible futures for the democratic left in Europe. This is because the intensity of the European integration process has permeated so many areas of national policymaking. Indeed, “more so than at any point in history the fate of social democracy and European integration have become interlinked.”

Parties of the democratic left have fared surprisingly poorly in postcommunist Russia. The reasons for this have to do with the legacy of the communist state, particularly the weakness of organized social associations outside the state and the continuing strength of patrimonial and corporatist patterns of state-society relations, together with constitutional and electoral institutions in the post-1993 system that undermine incentives for a system of competitive national political parties.