Green, or ecological ideology, locates its central animating concern outside of the human community in nature and especially the interlocking ecosystems that crisscross the Earth. No doubt there are many competing forms of ecological politics – some which decentre human life more radically than others. But the unique magnetic force experienced by the multiple followers of this map is largely due to the importance it ascribes not only to plants and animals, but also to lakes, rivers, mountains, forests, seas, and all the other habitats that serve as home to living creatures. For green politics, the planet is centrally significant.

This chapter starts by reconstructing the ethical and meaningmaking resources of green ideology, which originated in nineteenthcentury romanticism and its rejection of the Enlightenment's picture of nature as a mechanics. This critique of a machine-like cosmos was pioneered not only by romantic poets but also by writers such as Henry David Thoreau, who carried out radical new experiments in living. A diffuse ethos derived from these various figures subsequently seeped into competing ideologies from across the political spectrum, creating various fusions that continue to confound the dualism of left versus right.

In what follows, I establish the liquidity of green politics, which, like feminism, is not a solid structural object that can be cleanly taxonomized as “on the left”. Instead, it is a cultural map that is creatively adopted by an almost dizzying array of rival perspectives. These include the more strenuously anti-industrial politics of deep ecologists, counterculture hippies and pastoral conservatives, as well as the incremental and reform-minded approaches of eco-progressives and right libertarians. Lastly, there are various politics of ecological emergency that have intermixed with both socialist and fascist ideology. Thus, a cultural approach explodes the myth of a monumental green politics that is reducible to “tree huggers” and “environmental activists”. To remain within these culture war clichés is not only to block true understanding of one's own time but also to obscure the conflicting sources of meaning that often inform and complicate one's very own politics.

Social democracy is an ideology and political movement that emerged in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century in response to the processes of industrialization and democratization, and which shaped the politics of the continent ever since (Eley 2002; Keman 2017). Indeed, social democracy is behind the drive for universal suffrage, the development of comprehensive welfare systems and a tamed form of capitalism, although, obviously, and as this volume explains, the genealogy of these developments is eclectic.

The variation in the timing of these big social, economic and political changes meant that social democracy emerged in many shapes and guises and spread at a different pace across Europe. However, it is possible to just about identify a rough point of origin. The economic, political and ideological revolution that paved the way for social democracy was led by Britain, France and Germany. As Lindemann explained, “economically the British paved the way; politically the French offered the most influential model” and both “provided the context for modern socialist ideas” (1983: 8) to spread across the continent. Finally, as Engels suggested, Germany, where the first social democratic party emerged, offered the template for the practice of social democratic politics (1978 [1895]: 565).

The rise of social democracy roughly accompanied the processes of industrialization and democratization which were quite advanced in Britain but far less so in Russia, Spain, Sweden and even France. The process of industrialization provoked great demographic changes, which led to political transformations. Broadly speaking, those demographic changes were about the large exodus of workers from rural areas into urban centres. Those workers found themselves uprooted from their families, friends and familiar places, working in extremely harsh conditions in the new factories for a barely living wage but with no political voice and therefore without the power to transform their own lives.

In many ways their lives and lack of agency were not very different from the lives of European propertyless peasants, workers and paupers since immemorial times. What was different this time was that the ideals of the French Revolution, notably the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, as well as the liberal values that were empowering an assertive new political class, suggested that this state of affairs was not God-given and could be changed.

As European social democracy responded tentatively to the challenges posed by Soviet communism, fascism, the economic depression of the 1930s and the trail of destruction a new world war left across Europe, it went through a new transformation in its second act. This transformation was neither rapid nor straightforward. By processes of drift and layering, but also in response to big external shocks, European social democrats slowly revised their doctrine, programmes and practices.

Having settled on a parliamentary path to socialism, which now required the development of diverse electoral coalitions and relied on potential tactical alliances with bourgeois parties, they now had to reflect on social democracy's approach to capitalism. That process of revisionism started as a pragmatic and ad hoc response to immediate economic and political crises and electoral pressures, but by the 1950s it became a new doctrine, which revised the means of social democracy.

To chart this second phase in the history of European social democracy, this chapter explains how social democratic parties and intellectuals responded to the varied and challenging crises of the 1920s and 1930s, namely the rise of fascism and economic depression. Next, the chapter analyses how the economic consensus that emerged at the end of the Second World War set the stage for the revision of social democratic doctrine. The final section of the chapter charts how the end of the postwar consensus in the 1970s placed European social democracy on the defensive again. Along the way, the chapter explores variations in the practice of social democracy across Europe.

The interwar period: responding to different crises

The interwar years were disorientating because they brought European social democrats closer to political power (in some cases – in Germany, Austria, Britain and Spain – into government), but ultimately, they became distanced from the goal of emancipating workers through revolution and the overthrow of capitalism. The truth was that this was not an easy time to lead governments or to participate in electoral politics. The threat of fascism, the emergence of communist parties that competed for the same voters as social democratic parties and the Great Depression were big challenges to which European social democracy was ill-prepared.

In the few cases where social democrats found themselves in power, they entered government without a roadmap that led to socialism.

Social democracy only entered the European political lexicon in the 1870s, but there were earlier references to the term. Following the 1848 revolution, which established France's Second Republic, the word social democrat referred to the coalition between the republicans of the Mountain (La Montagne) and democratic socialists (Moschonas 2002: 17). However, its usage was rather limited across Europe. Far more common was the term socialism, of which several varieties existed.

More importantly, the term social democracy was used in a derogatory fashion by communists and revolutionary socialists. For example, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, Karl Marx explained that democratic socialists known as the La Montagne had drafted a programme that had removed “the revolutionary sting” from “the social demands of the proletariat” (Marx 1996 [1852]: 38). The implication of this was that social democracy was merely about “the reform of society in a democratic way, but a reform within petty-bourgeois limits” (Marx 1996 [1852]: 59). In short, social democracy was a bourgeois project. But as Friedrich Engels admitted in 1894, “things are different, and this word may perhaps do the job even though it remains inexact” (Engels quoted by Lenin 1992 [1917]: 7). Leaving aside Engels's concerns about its exact semantic value, what is clear is that by the 1870s social democracy not only came to mean something very different from its earlier reformist connotations but it also gained wider currency within European radical political circles.

This chapter charts the emergence of social democracy as a political movement and ideology in Europe from the 1870s. It starts by briefly explaining the political, social and ideational context in which it emerged. Next, it maps its beginnings from the foundation of the first social democratic party – Germany's Social Democratic Workers’ Party – to the spread of social democratic parties across Europe. The chapter also examines how social democrats navigated the doctrinal tensions created by their entry into electoral politics. Debates about conquering political power through the ballot box, the prospect of revolution or the promises of reform, and the potential cooperation with liberal parties gradually transformed social democracy. Finally, the chapter explains the impact of rising nationalism in Europe, the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution on social democracy.

Along the way, the chapter shows that social democracy did not evolve in a neat and linear form in the European continent.

In a familiar pattern, the third act of social democracy was defined by crisis, revisions and retreats. Faced with new demographic, political, economic and electoral challenges, European social democrats decided that the only way to survive as a political force was by diluting (this does not mean abandonment) their commitments to social justice and equality and accepting the primacy of markets over politics (Berman 2006). In short, social democrats stopped believing in the ability of the state to regulate the market with the purpose of achieving social democratic aims. The acceptance of monetarism and of the European Union's (EU) neoliberal turn privileged the pursuit of low inflation through a monetarist approach which entailed a commitment to fiscal discipline, which in turn required the retrenchment of the welfare state and the acceptance that inequalities may rise and that full employment may not be achieved. The nature of this revisionism was so encompassing that many analysts, scholars and activists wondered whether there was anything left of the European left.

To fully understand the third big transformation of European social democracy, the chapter starts by briefly outlining the political and economic context that led to it. Next, it identifies the three key factors that shaped the transformation of European social democracy in the 1990s, namely, demographic changes to the composition of the electoral coalitions of social democratic parties, globalization (and in particular the liberalization of international trade) and the triumph of neoliberalism, the neoliberal turn of the EU and the identity crisis triggered by the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and in eastern, central and Baltic Europe.

Next, the chapter charts the development of the new revisionism, popularly known as the Third Way, by outlining its main traits and analysing the debates among party intellectuals and the programmatic shifts that most social democratic parties underwent in this period. The chapter explains that this Third Way wave was not uniform across Europe, although, paradoxically, it contributed to a convergence of social democratic practices across the continent. Finally, the chapter shows that although initially it was spectacularly successful at the ballot box, by the early 2000s the Third Way wave started to crumble, paving the way for a new existential crisis of social democracy.

Social democracy started as a social movement in the factories, working men's clubs, coffee-houses, newsrooms and streets of European urban centres, but by the late nineteenth century it was “captured” by newly created social democratic parties which sought to take advantage of universal suffrage as the new tool to achieve socialist ends. Over the following 160 years or so, the actions and choices of social democratic parties shaped our understanding of social democracy. But that capture never meant “ownership”. Although the terms of doctrinal debates were largely set by social democratic parties, socialist intellectuals and activists developed the “set texts” of social democracy and closely monitored whether they were adhered to by the different parties. Occasionally intellectuals and activists were able to stop the pursuit of a certain path, or to force the inclusion of a policy goal. With the passing of time the tension in the relationship between political parties and intellectuals and activists became more acute, to the point where it is no longer certain whether social democratic parties practice social democracy.

The primacy of social democratic parties over activists and intellectuals does not mean the former controlled events and therefore their destinies. As Marx suggested in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, men make their own history but not in “circumstances they choose for themselves” (1996 [1875]: 38). In this constrained environment, social democratic parties had to work with the tools they encountered. In the late nineteenth century, those tools were male universal suffrage, and they too forced a course of action which was consequential. As Przeworski (1993) argued, choosing the parliamentary road to socialism meant prioritizing the short-term goal of winning elections over the long-term goal of overthrowing capitalism and developing a socialist society. This choice also meant that the socialist conquering of political power would be democratic.

Choosing this path to socialism was challenging. Universal male suffrage (and least of all universal suffrage) was not yet a reality across Europe and winning elections was fraught with difficulties. The working classes, in all their rich variety which included artisans, farm labourers, factory workers, office clerks and the new class of intellectuals who lived hand-to-mouth existences in the New Grub Streets of European cities, did not constitute a majority of the electorate. Even when they constituted a numerical majority, the working classes were not a political majority, because they were not a homogenous group.

The Third Way wave left European social democracy woefully ill-prepared for the political, economic and social turbulence of the first decades of the twenty-first century. When the global financial crisis of 2007–8 hit Europe, social democrats, who had spent the previous decade praising the dynamism of free markets and accepting light-touch regulation of the financial industry, did not know how to respond to it. However, this crisis was just the firing shot for over a decade of multiple, different and disorientating crises. Following the global financial crisis, Europe was hit by the eurozone crisis of 2010, the refugee crisis of 2015, the rise of the populist and radical right, Brexit, democratic backsliding in eastern and central Europe, the climate emergency, a pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, an energy crisis and a new war on the European continent. The dizzying speed at which each crisis was followed by another confounded policy-makers.

For social democrats this sense of disorientation was compounded by the loss of an ideological compass in the 1990s which could have offered some guidance on how to respond to these multiple challenges. The uncritical embrace of global capitalism, and in particular of the light-touch approach to financial regulation, which paved way to the global financial crisis left social democratic parties without an economic policy of their own (Manwaring & Kennedy 2018: 180). For these reasons, the crises of the first decades of the twenty-first century posed an existential challenge to European social democracy.

This chapter charts the travails of European social democrats since the global financial crisis of 2007–8. When the crisis started, some believed that the big crisis of capitalism had created a “social democratic moment”, that is, it had created a window of opportunity to revive social democracy (Bayley et al. 2016: 2). But for a variety of reasons, the elusive social democratic moment metamorphosed into an age of austerity and highly polarized politics which crucially did not insulate Europe from other crises. The chapter explains how this period was marked by the eclipse of electoral social democracy, which partly resulted from new changes to the electoral coalition of social democratic parties. With rare exceptions, social democrats were out of office, and when they were in power, they were too weak and isolated to develop social democratic responses to the multiple challenges they faced (Ryner 2016).

At the end of the Ottoman Empire, as explained in Chapter 1, the Kurds found themselves divided among four countries: the nation states of Iran and Turkey, the French mandate of Syria and the British mandate of Iraq. Syria and Iraq gained their independence when the mandates expired in 1946 and 1932 respectively. While the Kurds in Iraq and Syria enjoyed relative political and cultural freedom during the mandate years, the rest suffered from repressive measures implemented by both the Turkish and Iranian governments in their attempts to consolidate nation-building.

Reeling from the failure of various armed rebellions in the preceding years, the Kurdish movement took advantage of the relative freedom in Syria and Iraq to flourish. The strategy the Kurdish nationalist leaders sought was to focus on political and cultural development, keeping the passion for Kurdish ethnic consciousness alive. However, this position changed after the Second World War with the emergence of the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad (Iranian Kurdistan) in 1946, led by the newly founded Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), a joint collaboration between Kurdish nationalists in Iran and Iraq and supported by the Soviet occupiers of Azerbaijan. The years that followed the fall of this short-lived and ill-fated republic were marked by series of armed conflict between the KDPI and the Iranian government as well as in-fighting within the party, which caused substantial damage to the Kurdish nationalist movement overall, given the catalytic role the KDPI had assumed since the republic's formation. The political terrain in both Iran and Iraq changed dramatically from 1979 onwards, with the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran following the demise of the Shah, and Saddam Hussein being appointed to the position of president in Iraq. Both autocratic states pursued a brutal campaign against their political opponents, including the Kurds. The events that followed the Iraqi defeat in the Gulf War (1991), however, ushered in opportunities for the setting up of an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, which eventually came to fruition after the demise of Saddam regime, following the US-led invasion of Iraq (2003).

While Kurdish nationalism became stronger, growing from the concern of a relatively small intellectual elite to a mass social movement by the 1990s, its appeal was also boosted, transcending state and continental boundaries.

DEFINITIONS

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a nation as “a group of people with the same language, culture and history, who live in a particular area under one government”. Additionally, “a nation may comprise part of a state, be coterminous with the state or extend beyond the boundaries of a single state” (Tamadonfar & Lewis 2023: 23). Anthony Smith, who has developed the ethno-symbolism approach to the study of nations and nationalism, however, has emphasized the subjective and emotive bonds in his definition of a nation. He sees the nation as a named human population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members (Smith 1993: 12). Regarding a nation-state, Giddens defines it as “a collectivity existing within a demarcated territory, which is subject to a unitary administration, reflexively monitored both by internal state apparatus and those of other states”. He further defines a nation-state as “a set of institutional forms of governance maintaining an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external violence” (Giddens 1985: 116).

To date, scholars have been divided in their response to the question: when is a nation? Three different theories have emerged in response to this question in the last few decades, featuring in most scholarly work on nations and nationalism. These are: primordialism, modernism and ethno-symbolism (Smith 1971). Proponents of the primordialism theory, as the name suggests, argue that nations have always existed: they have existed since time immemorial; they are a natural part of human beings; and our national identity is part of our own being. A closely related approach to primordialism is perennialism, the proponents of which argue that nations are not natural but antique. Both of these approaches, however, argue that the existence of nation is a given, fixed and static (Özkırımlı 2010: 58).

Modernists such as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, however, argue that neither nation nor nationalism is primordial or perennial.