DISCUSSION
Female Speaker: You started your remarks by saying that Dick is an optimist. Your presentation was extremely optimistic, and I have a question for you.
Richard Bensinger: I lied.
Female Speaker: My understanding is that organizing in this country has not been doing so well in the last five years. Indeed, in the American labor movement, we've lost members. My question to you is, to what do you attribute this?
Richard Bensinger: Number one, a law in the private sector that makes workers walk through minefields. Just as importantly, number two, the labor movement still, for the most part, doesn't put enough resources into organizing. It's just rhetoric.
The labor movement generally operates as an adjunct to the Democratic Party, and the right to organize is not on the Democratic Party agenda. Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party is much interested in the right to organize. I just had to go up to Connecticut to beg Chris Dodd's staff to support card check at a company that's fired workers, even pulled a gun on one of the witnesses in an NLRB proceeding. I had to argue why Dodd should do more than just write a letter to the NLRB. (It is worth noting that Joe Lieberman actually was the first person to endorse card check there.)
Richard Ford: You said earlier that 90 percent of the things you used to think about organizing were wrong. As someone who was trained by the Organizing Institute on the Richard Bensinger model, can you tell me what some of those things are?
Richard Bensinger: Let me apologize now. Sorry I wrecked your life. The full answer makes for too long a discussion, but I'll can give you one example. Give me no staff, a thousand workers where there's issues, and a good committee of people from the job site. Everyone else can stay home. I think we need to run a different kind of campaign, based on the old committee structure. I'm not arguing we don't need organizers, we still do. But I've certainly backed away from massive house-calling. Let the committee handle the contacts.
Rachelle Horowitz: What, actually, are you organizing for? I heard three things in your speech. One, you are organizing to change labor law; two, you are organizing to help workers get better salaries and be better represented on their jobs; three, you are organizing a new social movement for deeper social change. But what's important?
Richard Bensinger: It's an interesting question. My answer may not be the one some people want to hear. I organize to help workers on the job, not for a social movement, not for any ulterior reasons – not even for good ulterior reasons. Maybe I've been lowering my expectations over the years. But I feel if we just focused on helping workers on the job and organizing, the movement would come back.
Sometimes if you think in grandiose terms you too easily get discouraged. I respect people who don't want unions very much. Maybe that's a change I've had. I don't think everyone does need a union. I think there are many good employers where there is not a pressing need. That view is not the view of the movement advocates, and probably would create controversy even in this room. For me to be personally consistent, I have to respect employers if they treat their workers fairly. I lectured the carpenters recently that if you show up at a job site and a majority of workers don't want you, don't picket them, just leave. The labor movement shouldn't run corporate campaigns, where they have hire 300 organizers to take on a big corporation, unless they've hired organizers to first go out and talk to the workers. We can sometimes be as undemocratic as some companies. But when a majority of workers do want the union, the company should leave them alone, and not force them to walk through minefields. This will probably create a controversy here just as I end my presentation.
Male Speaker: A number of us who are working at the state level realize that we can't do very much about federal labor law reform right now, so what about working on state laws that can make organizing more fair? For example, in California, no public money can be used to support or deter organizing. Isn't that an effective tool?
Richard Bensinger: It's very effective. Some of the best organizing is now taking place by leveraging politicians, as SEIU has done in California in the home health care field. Governor Pataki has been leveraged by Unite to accept a bill covering government contractors. But in these cases the workers we're organizing are 95 percent public sector. That's half the equation. We now have to bring the private sector along as well.
Another point is that we shouldn't lie about numbers. We shouldn't gloat that we're organizing a million people a year. I gave a speech last year. I was preceeded by someone from a large institution I used to work for who said we're organizing a million people a year. A listener who heard us both said to me, you can't have it both ways. Was that lady lying, or were you lying? You saying you're not organizing anybody, it's too tough, while she says you're doing a million members a year. You can't deal with a crisis if you don't admit there's a crisis.
Male Speaker: Polls indicate that a lot of working people would like a union. These numbers have improved over a period of time, I gather. Yet, these people are not joining unions, they don't get organized. Part of the reason that is given is that we have a lousy labor law system in the United States. But that's been true for an awfully long time, and was even when many more workers were coming into the labor movement. So it seems hard to blaming it all on the lousy labor law. If there's a feeling out there that people want to organize and they're not coming into the unions, maybe we have to look someplace else for the answer. Employers are hostile? They've always been hostile. Employers are vicious? They've always been vicious.
One of the things that I think about, and it is keynoted by your remarks about the relationship to the Democratic Party, is whether or not part of our problem is a cultural disconnect between the world inhabited by the labor leadership and its key allies and the world of the people that we are trying to organize. Maybe they do want to be part of the labor movement, but they're not so sure that the labor movement is their movement?
Richard Bensinger: Workers in this country actually don't want conflict, they don't want to stage a revolution. They just want a union. As one gentleman from Alcoa whom I interviewed recently said, he's been anti-union for 22 years, but only because he was told from his first day of work that he'd lose his job. But another reason we don't organize in this country is because workers are happy. We don't like to admit that. That's not a bad thing, that's a good thing. We need to be introspective. Some of the human relations consulting groups that employers have are off-the-charts sophisticated. People aren't greatly mistreated in Nissan plants. They make a little higher wages than UAW workers, and they have incredible benefits. They're the highest paid industrial workers in the South. They would love to have a union, but it's a cost-benefit proposition. Joining up is a risk that as a normal person, just looking to get by in life, thinks he can't afford to take. You know what, I wouldn't either. I've been in a number of situations where I sometimes wonder about what I'm asking people to do. Nissan may be the greatest job they'll ever have.
Then there are the people that are new to this country, undocumented workers, paid by labor brokers. They're the other extreme, often paid under the table. Doug McCarron is giving us a good example of how to reach out to these people. He has put tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars into being nice to the contractors. I kid him that he sometimes seems more like a contractor than he does a union leader. But now he's going into a place like Phoenix and spending millions of dollars to bring marginal workers into the union. Now the employers are saying, enough of that. It's going to be an interesting situation.
Dick Wilson: Richard, thank you. You can order copies of his book, "Reaching Higher: A Handbook for Union Organizing Committee Members" at OrgResources@aol.com It's an unusual pamphlet, different from most because it's aimed at the organizing committee. It outlines what a committee person ought to do. It takes into account the fact, for example, that in many ways the average person supports the mission of his employer. He wants his company to succeed. He just wants his share of it. But I've never seen put this way in an organizers' pamphlet before. It doesn't stress opposition to the company, it stresses a better situation for the worker. That says a lot.
Thank you, Richard.
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Session II: Europe, The Left and Anti-Americanism
Robert Leiken: A central question for our next panel might be summarized this way: what role did the European left play in encouraging the strident attacks on the United States that have been mounted in Europe and elsewhere over the past year or so?
A second issue might this: In the years following World War II, when Stalin's army was in Eastern Europe and Stalinist parties seemed on the verge of coming to power in Western Europe, American and European intellectuals and sections of the labor movement rallied to found such institutions as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter magazine. Is such a grouping conceivable today?
We are fortunate to have here this morning to diagnose the current problem and perhaps to prescribe some remedies three men deeply steeped in Europe. Andrei Markovits is a professor at Michigan University, and he's been a visiting professor at Harvard this semester. He's also the author of compelling books, such as "The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond," and was the keynote speaker at the Green Congress in Germany in 2001. He's going to examine attitudes about Iraq that surfaced in Germany and other European countries recently.
After Professor Markovits, we're going to hear from Jeffrey Herf, who is a professor at the University of Maryland, and the author of several important books on the legacy of Nazism in modern Germany and on the Euro missile debate. He will also explore the roots of the current attitudes, expecially in Germany.
Michael Allen will finish up. Michael is a British citizen who has been active in the British labor movement's push toward modernization. He is a contributor to Renewal, a journal aligned with the Blair wing of the British Labour Party, and a visiting fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.
Andrei Markovits: The title of my paper comes from a German proverb which means the tone makes the music, indicating that form matters at least as much as substance, or, better still, that form in fact is substance.
Accordingly, I'll talk about “how” rather than “what.” My focus is the steady and growing resentment of the United States, indeed most things American, that has permeated European discourse since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the bipolar world of the Cold War came to an end.
As I've argued in previous writing, European resentment of the United States dates back to July 5, 1776. In the late 18th century one could already observe some of the patterns that are with us today. Europeans still often regard Americans as brash, arrogant, ignorant, culturally inferior, politically naïve, motivated only by money – to mention but a few of the common tropes that have persisted over time. To be sure, there were also countervailing voices that accorded positive images to the United States, seeing it, its people, culture and economy in a positive light. Europe's liberals – that is, in the European sense of the term liberal, which of course is different from that in the United States – as well as its early socialists and some radicals -– that is, liberals in the American sense of the term –- usually welcomed America's otherness by extolling its dynamism, its egalitarianism, and its innovative spirit.
But there can be little doubt that the negative has far outweighed the positive, especially since the former remained a constant, whereas the latter has only flourished during particular epochs. For example, the United States was embraced by many Europeans after World War II, but often as the lesser of two evils, because it was better than the evil of the Soviet Union and communism.
The current virulent anti-Americanism in Europe grew on very fertile ground and represents a qualitative continuity rather than a sudden change. This is different from the impression given both by wishful and naïve Americans, and by European commentators busily trying to cover their tracks in an exculpatory exercise that blames the resentment and anger entirely on American foreign policy and the presence of George W. Bush. I'm participating in a larger research project on anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism since 1990 in Europe. This involves content analysis of leading newspapers and journals. In order to make the argument that there is something else at work besides what we see in government and politics, we've excluded all references to politics and policy. We have also cut off research with materials from the the end of 2002 on, so that we are not caught up in the Iraq issue. I've even excluded the 565 references to “cowboy,” a word that is used reflexively to describe George W. Bush.
My paper tells the story of anti-Americanism in four European countries between January 1, 1992 and December 31, 2002. I have looked at a lot of public opinion data, which I will not bore you with. I'll just mention the basic fact that 25-30 percent Europeans have held attitudes that have been consistently negative toward the United States, and that this has actually increased over the course of the late 1990s.
For the project at hand, I systematically collected the following newspapers: from England, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times of London, The Sunday Times of London, The London Observer and the Daily Telegraph. From France, Le Monde, Le Figaro, Liberation. From Italy, Corriere Della Sera, La Stampa, Il Messaggero. From Germany, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt, Der Tagesspiegel, Die Tageszeitung and Die Zeit. I also gathered weeklies like Der Spiegel and Le Point, L'Express and Oggi, but I've actually not yet looked at the data conclusively.
Obviously, there is some concentration here. One should not speak of Europe, because these are just the big four of Europe. Even that is contentious, because Spain and Poland would be very upset by my saying the big four -- it's now the big six. The reason Spain and Poland are not part of the study so far has to do with my linguistic shortcomings, but I hope that with some more research assistance I will be able to look at those countries as well.
I looked at adjectives and adverbs. In other words, I'm interested in what the tone of the music is. To summarize my findings, I even looked at various sporting events, not just at politics, and at aspects of culture, which in fact provide an overall pattern of the following sort.
There is an increasing irritation, anger and condescension towards the United States. More than 80 percent of the articles have at least one manifest adjective, adverb or phrase of that speaks in irritation with the American phenomenon that is being described. Again, note, this is not politics. These include all kinds of topics, such as the world of sports. In the paper I have all kinds of examples that show that really there is a baseline of irritation that goes way beyond politics.
In addition to irritation and anger and condescension, there is what I would call ridicule. There is a strong element of ridicule toward various aspects of American politics and society, even in areas in which there have been important contributions by the United States to world development. For instance, the word feminism is often infused with connotations of American prudishness and puritanism, even in left-liberal publications. There is a lot of data on the Monica Lewinsky affair that shows that Europeans saw the American reaction to it in a very negative way.
Two other examples, then my conclusions. The anti-globalization movement that began in the 1990s started from a critique not only of globalization, but of Americanization. In the course of the last ten years, it has become primarily a critique of Americanization. You can see how criticisms of large multinational corporations that are not American have faded, and those of companies perceived to be American have increased. Jose Bove's leveling of McDonalds in France and his attacks against Monsanto have rarely if ever been analyzed in the French press, including even the left-leaning press, as something akin to what can be called Poujade-ism -- an important neo-rightist movement of the 1950s.
Finally, the much-touted sympathy and solidarity with the United States after 9/11 was actually quite ephemeral. Almost immediately after Le Monde editorialized that "we are all Americans," or when Peter Struck said the same thing at the German Bundestag, articles appeared that started to question what happened, making all kinds of insinuations involving the Mossad and other conspirators. There was a lot of what the Germans call “schaudenfreude:” delight at having someone else getting hurt. The Americans had it coming to them.
In my paper I divide this anti-Americanism into four-fold tables. There is an imaginary four-fold table between left and right and culture and politics. I will summarize each one with one word. Left politics basically sees the United States as simply an imperialist actor. Right politics sees it as an inept leader, not worthy of leadership. Left culture sees the United States as exploitative. Right culture, sees the United States basically as uncivilized.
To conclude, why all this is happening involves what in horseracing could be called a trifecta: it takes structure, agents and contingency. All are important, even indispensable. Various people may give one or another of these three the greater weight in causing European irritation with America. But I would give structure the definite pride of place.
Clearly contingencies did matter. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the Monica Lewinsky affair, the killing of tourists by hotdogging U.S. Air Force pilots in the Italian Alps, the miscues on Florida ballots in the 2000 presidential election, just to name a few turns of events, clearly affected Europeans' view of America.
There can be no doubt that George W. Bush, with his in-your-face rejectionism of international conventions and arrangements, had a harmful effect on America's image in Europe, and indeed in the world, as did the Administration's tone.
Basically, however, the structural arguments are the following. I will list four of them. First and foremost, there exists the bane of size. In other words, the United States is criticized just for being the 800-pound gorilla, and here I have interesting parallels to how Germany is viewed in the rest of Europe. In other words, if you are big, you are criticized for just being big. If you do nothing, you're arrogant. If you do something, you're arrogant. No one likes the New York Yankees, and in Germany, no one likes Bayer Munich, the major German soccer team. Or, to take an English example, Manchester United. So that's number one.
Second, there's a structural disconnect between power and culture, between size and history. The U.S. has too much power and size, not enough culture and history.
Third and perhaps most important, the structures of the post-communist period are fundamentally different from those that informed global and European politics between 1945 and 1990. In the latter, Western Europe and the United States faced a common enemy, the Soviet Union, its Eastern European satellites and communism. There were, by the way, important common interests, but I would emphasize interests rather than common values.
Lastly, the shift in power relations has been a major contributing factor to the current transatlantic disharmony. Europe has embarked willy-nilly on a state-building process whose telos remains unclear to everybody, but whose concrete manifestations are evident in a set of institutional powers that affect aspects of every European's daily existence. To put it crudely, it's unclear at the moment what a Greek and a Swede really share, or a Brit and a Sicilian. But one thing they clearly do share is namely not being an American. I think it's very important in a structural way – clearly when you create a new identity, you also need something that you're not. Europeans clearly are not Americans, and I think this disharmony will continue unabated, and will even become stronger.
Jeffrey Herf: Professor Markovits has given us much food for thought, and, hopefully, my remarks will complement his.
The central issue I want to address is the following: why, after over half a century of public reflection about coming to terms with the Nazi past, did a left-of-center German government refuse to participate in and then oppose a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq? To pose the issue in this way does not assume that Saddam Hussein was identical to Hitler or that his regime was a carbon copy of Nazi Germany. It does assume that Saddam's combination of Europe's mid-century totalitarian legacies, his record of foreign policy aggression and miscalculation, his determination to accumulate weapons of mass destruction and his links to international terrorism, all combined with vast resources of oil, should have been recognized as a grave threat to the Middle East, the United States and Europe.
Advocates of Germany's position argued that inspections, containment and deterrence would keep Saddam in check, and that American policy would only inflame rather than defeat terrorism inspired by Islamic radicalism. My core thesis is that German opposition to the war in Iraq lay in an inadequate and partial understanding of the meaning of armed antifascism, of how and why Hitler got into a position to start the Second World War, and their failure to grasp the relevance of debates over preemption and appeasement in the 1930s to the Iraq crisis of the recent decades. As a historian of Germany's often-impressive efforts to confront the criminality of the Nazi era, I found the policies of 2002-2003 profoundly disappointing.
The lessons and memory of the Nazi past divided not only West and East Germany. Within West Germany they divided conservatives and social democrats, or, rather, conservatives and a majority of social democrats. Within the Social Democratic Party, the dominant tradition by far remains rooted in the moods and language of Willy Brandt's détente policy. Helmut Schmidt, who was one of the initiators of the NATO decision to deploy intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Western Europe, and also the decision to negotiate with the Soviet Union in hopes that the deployments would be unnecessary, lost support in his own party over this issue -- as many of you know. In place of Schmidt's blend of traditional realpolitik and diplomacy, the SPD's foreign policy thinking was dominated by Brandt and his foreign policy adviser, Egon Barr.
Gerhardt Schroeder, the current chancellor, emerged from the majority wing of the party, which had opposed the Euro missile decision. The key lessons this wing has learned from the Nazi past are those enshrined in Brandt's speeches and essays over the early 1970s. German foreign policy should be peace policy. Its main tasks should be overcoming the legacies of Nazi aggression, reconciling with neighbors and former victims, opposing arms races and restricting the German military to one task and one task alone – deterring an attack on Germany and defending the country if it is attacked.
During and after German unification, as Professor Markovits has so well explained, these Brandtian themes continued in the diplomacy of Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, both of whom were fully aware of the need to reassure Europe that a unified Germany would not, as Jay Leno put it at the time, go on tour again. Rather, there would be a European Germany in a unified Europe. So what began as the message of Social Democratic foreign policy of the 1970s became conventional wisdom across the political spectrum by the early 1990s.
During the battle over the Euro missiles, lessons of the Nazi era divided neatly on political lines. With few exceptions, it was conservatives who applied the lessons of Munich and the dangers of appeasement to the need to deploy the missiles if the Soviets refused to dismantle their medium-range arsenal.
Joschka Fischer, then a new member of the Green parliamentary faction, and now the foreign minister, compared the logic of Western nuclear deterrence to the logic that led to Auschwitz. The postmodern West German left saw the roots of Nazi criminality in instrumental rationality common to both the Nazi regime and American nuclear strategy. Fischer and Otto Schilly, then still a member of the Green Party, now the German attorney general, along with a majority of the Social Democrats in the Bundestag, rejected arguments made mostly by West German conservatives that the lessons of the '30s might apply to the Western left's rejection of the NATO decision.
Moreover, due both to the 1960s new left, the discourse of détente and the memory of the Nazi war on the Eastern front in the Second World War, opposition to a hard line rooted in anticommunist or anti-Soviet sentiment remained widespread among West German liberals and leftists. This opposition was apparent in criticism both of Jimmy Carter's human rights campaign and criticism and opposition to the Reagan administration's hard line.
But something interesting happened in the late 1990s. In 1998 and 1999, during the Kosovo crisis, it appeared that a Rubicon had been crossed. The memory of Nazism in German left of center politics assumed a new and diametrically opposed meaning. The novelist and essayist Peter Schneider, Green politician in Frankfurt-Main Daniel von Dendet, singer and essayist Wolf Biermann, and now Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer -- all connected the memory of the Holocaust to the need for an armed antifascism. They supported military intervention in the Balkans to put an end to ethnic cleansing and mass murder. For the first time in postwar German history, liberal and left of center actors connected support for Western and American military intervention to the discourse of antifascism.
The East German government, of course, had spoken the language of antifascism for half a century. But its version looked to the United States as the main threat, obliterated the distinctiveness of the German past in generalizations about capitalism, and fell into moral disrepute as a German state which supported the Arab wars against Israel. Although lacking the resources of a national government, the radical left in West Germany had spoken in similar terms.
Fischer's advocacy of German military intervention in the Balkans, late and limited as it was, suggested that the memory of the Nazi past no longer led instinctively to pacifism or refusal to use Germany's armed forces to defend human rights in Europe. Perhaps most importantly, it showed that Fischer and others took seriously the idea that totalitarian regimes and movements could emerge in present times.
So, I confess, after this turn during the Kosovo crisis, despite the abundant evidence that Professor Markovits and others have presented regarding anti-Americanism, I was surprised that Schroeder adopted his unequivocal "no" last summer. I was disappointed that Foreign Minister Fischer went along. The case for invading and overthrowing the Iraqi regime was a more difficult one to make than was the intervention in Kosovo. For a German politician to make that argument, a further step in reflection on the Nazi past would have been necessary.
This next step Schroeder was probably intellectually ill-equipped and his foreign minister unwilling to make. It required making the very arguments that Fischer had denounced in the Bundestag in 1982, arguments regarding the dangers of appeasement, the need for preemption against an arming dictatorship, and for shorter and less costly war now to forestall larger and more disastrous war later. It required a willingness to use words like fascism, Stalinism or totalitarianism, or even a contemporary hybrid of nationalism and socialism, to describe the Iraqi regime, and to think hard about the arsenal of weapons such a regime, with vast reserves of oil, would sooner or later certainly be able to accumulate. It required the ability to make a case about the dangers that a regime with a record of miscalculation and barbarism would pose, as I indicated earlier, not only to the United States or Israel but to the other states of the Gulf region and also to Germany and Europe. It required the ability to think about the Iraqi mixture of totalitarian dictatorship and weapons of mass destruction, about the reactionary modernist synthesis of political irrationality and modern technology.
From this perspective, perhaps the most startling aspect of the German opposition to the war with Iraq was that the impulse to refrain from the use of force, so often attributed to criticism of Cold War anticommunism, has lasted beyond Communism's demise. It has persisted in the face of the first regime since the fascist and Nazi era to combine those older political traditions with the possibility of accumulating weapons that could threaten Europe directly. Objectively -- as we used to say when we were young – in terms of its consequences and regardless of its intentions, Gerhard Schroeder adopted a policy of anti-antifascism, or anti-anti-totalitarianism.
The argument I'm making about the importance of historical traditions and memory in the Iraq crisis finds its confirmation in the contrasting policies of Tony Blair and Jack Straw, as well as in Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe. Blair, by far the most articulate and convincing advocate of the war on either side of the Atlantic, did so with the cadences, discourse, logic and arguments derived from Winston Churchill and George Orwell, passed on by an intact and proud liberal intellectual and political establishment. (For evidence of this, see Churchill's biography of one of Blair's political mentors, Roy Jenkins.) A full appreciation of Churchill, Orwell, but also Franklin Roosevelt, has yet to enter into German political culture.
In conclusion, I might note that none of the leading Democratic candidates for president in the U.S., nor the leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress, has spoken with Blair's passion and clarity. Nor do I once recall any one of them evoking the memory and policies of Franklin Roosevelt, and the proud traditions of the Democratic Party in the war against Nazism and fascism. The editorial pages of the Washington Post and the New Republic were considerably ahead of the left-of-center political leaders in this regard. As Blair and Straw found their voice in the traditions of Churchill and Orwell, so American liberals hopefully will find similar sustenance in evoking Roosevelt, a president whose legacy has been strangely absent in the recent public discourse of a Democratic Party.
The task for German liberals in this century, as the great German historian of Nazism Karl Bracher noted several decades ago, is to make clear that the totalitarian impulses of Europe's mid-century did not disappear from world politics, but have resurfaced in previously romanticized places in what used to be called the Third World. (Paul Berman will address this issue very well later, I'm sure.) It will be awhile before such inclinations become widespread in Germany. In the short term, I suggest that American liberals remind our German friends in as civil and friendly way as we can – and they are our friends – that Germany missed its opportunity to support the first war to overthrow a government with significant residues of the fascist and Nazi past since 1945. Germany remains our firm ally, but how firm and how reliable in the next crisis remains to be seen.
If American liberal politicians want to have a snowball's chance in hell to win the election in 2004, I suggest they refresh their knowledge of Franklin Roosevelt's diplomacy and war making, and remind American voters of the internationalist traditions of the Democratic Party which he established.
As far as American policy in postwar Iraq, I would suggest the obvious. Crush the Baath Party
completely. Restore law and order. Hold extensive trials dealing with crimes of the past government and
prevent the former Baathists from insinuating themselves into the new regime. Devote enough resources
and stay in Iraq long enough to see that a democracy emerges and that the doubters and critics around the
world are proven wrong yet again.
Michael Allen: My contribution will differ from Richard Bensinger's excellent presentation in at least one key respect: I'm going to indulge in abstract generalizations rather than the granular specifics of case studies. But mine will also be more activist-oriented than the two excellent academic presentations we've just heard.
I want to make three key points. First, the anti-Americanism that we've seen on the European left is itself a symptom of the degree of ideological confusion and the strategic dead end that European social democracy finds itself in. Second, as Bob Leiken suggested, the situation is uncannily analogous to the late 1940s and early 1950s, in that uncomfortably large sectors of the left have a degree of intellectual infatuation with authoritarian and incipiently totalitarian ideologies. Third, organized labor must be a key component of any intellectual and political response to the situation we find ourselves in.
I'm not going to go into nuance and the detail with regard to anti-Americanism in Europe, or, for that matter, instances of anti-Europeanism that we've seen lately in the United States. But I might point out that European anti-Americanism isn't the exclusive preserve of the left. Jacques Chirac is, of course, no comrade. But we mustn't delude ourselves that the frankly repellent comments that many people on the European left made after 9/11 were limited to marginal intellectuals of the cultural left, the likes of Dario Fo or Jean Baudrillard and Harold Pinter. Because as repellent as those comments were, they did find an audience and they did have a resonance on the wider European left. It's uncomfortable to admit that.
This isn't a new phenomenon. In the late 1940s Sidney Hook described European intellectuals as "shockingly ignorant of life and politics in the United States." I think that comment would still hold up today. Hook said that most European intellectuals derived their knowledge of the United States from the novels of Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck. I guess the contemporary equivalents would be that most European intellectuals, and many European citizens, derive their image of American politics and society from Hollywood and from the likes of Michael Moore's depressingly successful dreck.
Just a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine from Stockholm told me that he'd just come back from a meeting addressed by Noam Chomsky -- projected as representing the American left -- which was attended by over a thousand activists in Stockholm. There were an extra couple of hundred people locked out of this meeting.
This is surely a depressing state of affairs. But what is even more disturbing is that more sophisticated and respectable commentators – I'm thinking of people like Will Houghton, a British academic and journalist – have a more sophisticated and respectable strain of anti-Americanism in their work, which is often conflated with a defense of the so-called European social model. It's as if we cannot build and respect our own European social institutions without contrasting them with the other across the Atlantic.
Of course, what we normally see is really a juxtaposition of caricatures. We have the caricature of the European social model, which is categorized by social solidarity and high levels of union membership and a nice welfare safety net and a high degree of labor protectionism and union rights. Which of course only applies to a relatively small section of the European labor market and a relatively small number of European countries. This European social model is then contrasted to a caricature of the United States' political economy, of atomized individuals, of stark and racially charged inequalities. Some of this may be uncomfortably true, but the contrast caricatures both sides, and poisons the debate.
One doesn't want to exaggerate, because interests will probably win out over ideology. There are compelling economic and strategic interests that bind the United States and Europe together. One statistic that came to my attention recently: if one looks at U.S. investment over the last eight years in just the tiny little Netherlands alone, that investment was twice the U.S. investment in Mexico, and ten times the U.S. investment in China. So there are compelling strategic interests shared by the United States and Europe that are not going to be fundamentally disrupted by these current squabbles.
Having said that, let me return to my point that social democracy in Europe is in something of a crisis. (This wouldn't be a meeting of the left if we didn't refer to the word crisis at least once.) In the last two years, the left has lost power in France and Portugal, in Norway, in Denmark, and in Italy. It lost power in the Netherlands as well, but has crept back in. The left or the center left is only in a position of political dominance in the UK, Germany, Sweden and, everybody's favorite, Belgium.
This political difficulty is compounded by the fact that social democracy is also in something of an ideological crisis. The traditional tenets of social democracy are being fundamentally challenged, if not invalidated, by such tendencies as globalization. So there's an ideological crisis that feeds anti-Americanism.
There is a second way in which what is happening now in some ways mirrors the 1940s and '50s. I'm one of these people who doesn't have much of a social life, so I often spend Saturday nights reading the biographies of dead trade union leaders. I was reading recently about Ernest Bevin, who was the greatest of all British labor union leaders. He built up the Transport and General Workers Union, which was at one point Britain's biggest union. And, of course, he went on to serve as Minister of Labor in the Churchill coalition, the wartime coalition, and was the Foreign Minister in the postwar Labour government. The story goes that when Bevin returned from the Potsdam Conference, one of his Labour colleagues said to him, "So what are Stalin and the Russians really like?" Bevin replied, "They're just like the Communists."
Bevin by this time had spent twenty years fighting communism in his own union, and in the Labour Party. He knew the nature of the beast. People like Bevin, people like Irving Brown, people like Jay Lovestone, were not seduced intellectually or politically by communism, by its fellow travelers or by neutralists and Third Force fantasists like Pietro Nenni. They knew the nature of the beast.
Sadly, I think we have a generation on the left now -- this will be about the 20th gross generalization of this brief talk -- that has been politically and intellectually formed in radically different contexts. It has been contaminated by what I would call the kind of '68 syndrome. Its politics have been compromised by the ethical relativism of postmodernism. It is preoccupied, certainly in Europe, by the insularity of the so-called European social model, which hasn't really responded to the challenges of Reaganomics or Thatcher-Reagan neoliberalism. The Third Way, which seemed at one point to be a coherent response, has run to ground, and divisions have emerged between Blair and Schroeder -- two of the mainstays of the third way.
All this brings me back to the importance of the labor movement as the organizational and intellectual backbone of any meaningful center-left or post-social democrat or neo-social democrat response to the situation we find ourselves in. It was no accident that the trade union movement was a key protagonist in the late 1940s and early 1950s in establishing the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other such initiatives. It is a myth that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was purely an initiative of intellectuals and academics. The likes of Irving Brown and the AFL-CIO and the DGB in Germany and other labor elements key in developing a sustainable and robust intellectual and political response to the threat of communism.
I think the same applies today. The labor movement is critical for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is a global network that acts as a conduit to those democratic forces and political agencies that we need to mobilize globally, not just in Europe and the United States. Secondly of course, labor unions have always been schools for democrats. We can see that in democratic transitions from South Africa and Poland, contemporary Zimbabwe and so on. They provide the skills and the ideological training that many people need. Thirdly, as I've already noted, unions have played a key historic role in developing a center-left intellectual response to totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies and dissipating their appeal to some of the more vulnerable elements on the left. Fourthly, to a large extent, unions are the institutional embodiment of the values of democratic participation and social solidarity, that I think we do need to counterpose to the individualizing ethos of neoliberalism.
Finally, I want in conclusion to quote from a letter that an obscure conservative political philosopher sent to one of his colleagues in 1959, when the American conservative movement was at something of a nadir. He said, "We cannot give up the fight, and we must be happy if we can save that tiny minority, which is the cream of the younger generation." The author of that letter was Leo Strauss. That tiny minority that he refers to, of course, is now helping to shape United States foreign policy and to a large extent the shape of the world as we emerge into the 21st century.
There's an awesome long-term task that confronts the center-left or the post-social democratic left. But there are two immediate priorities. One, it's imperative to convene and mobilize the center-left around an ambitious and unashamed democratic internationalism. One of the most depressing aspects of the Iraq episode has been the extent to which the left forgot its own traditions of democratic internationalism. It is critical to confront not only anti-Americanism, but other incipient undemocratic ideas that are taking hold on the left today. I'm thinking partly of the anti-modernist and protectionist impulses that we see in the anti-globalization movement. I'm thinking of the ethical relativism that has disabled the left's response to radical Islam.
Finally, it's important that center-left initiatives avoid sectarianism. We need to engage, as the Congress of Cultural Freedom and other initiatives did, with democrats on the right, in the center, on the liberal left. Remember how the Congress for Cultural Freedom brought together Sidney Hook and Raymond Aron and Edward Shils and Isaiah Berlin. We need to make common cause today with those people who may not share all of our philosophies. I think this is particularly the case in countries like France, where there's still a disturbingly strong residue of Marxism and anti-Americanism.
Irving Kristol once said that when intellectuals decide that they need to act, they set up a magazine. Today, of course, whenever anybody wants to have an impact on the real world they start a web site. That could be one important first step.
There is a strategic opportunity here, given the circumstances with which we're faced. But there's also a political imperative. For those of us from the left who still identify in some ways with the left, I think there's also a moral imperative.
DISCUSSION
Robert Leiken: There are two broad areas here that can be explored: one, the diagnosis of what's been going on in Europe, the other, prescriptions for what we could do about it. Questions?
Arch Puddington: There are those of us who see in a radical Islam a phenomenon that in many ways parallels the threat communism posed to the values that we share in common with our European friends. I wonder if the speakers would elaborate on what European intellectuals think of the threat of radical Islam today.
Andrei Markovits: First of all, I don't think it would be quite appropriate to say that there is a single category called European intellectuals. This is still, thank God, a very motley group of people. I can think of radical critics of this phenomenon, some every bit as vigorous Paul Berman or others here.
What Mike Allen said is important. I don't know of many European intellectuals who are extolling Islamism. There were some "artists" and others who reveled in a certain kind of anti-Americanism, but their impulse was basically, "sock it to the big guy" – again, that bane of size I mentioned before. There was also "schadenfreude," shown in the extreme by people like Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composer, who called 9/11 one of the greatest acts of art. But by and it would be wrong to say that European intellectuals extol radical Islamism.
But what Michael said was that many Europeans see this as a challenge to American hegemony, and they don't believe they are sympathizing with radical Islam but rather with a kind of a popular Third World challenge to the iniquities of American imperialism.
The point about moral relativism that Michael mentioned is also very important. Any Third World movement is ipso facto somewhat acceptable just by being not of the First World. I would venture to say that the same folks who did not unequivocally denounce 9/11 would have certainly done so had it been the work of, let's say, German neo-Nazis.
Jeffrey Herf: The reaction of the German establishment, which now is a Social Democratic establishment, is something to take note of. When we talk about left-leaning intellectuals or Social Democrats, we are talking about the German government, not some professors at the University of Frankfurt.
Their reactions on the whole to the attacks of September 11 were reactions of complete solidarity with the United States. It was this government that sent its AWACS planes flying up and down the East Coast, when our Air Force planes were over in Afghanistan. The German ambassador in Washington, D.C., Wolfgang Ischinger, is someone I've known for many years, and a superb diplomat. He showed that after the attacks of September 11 there wasn't really any difference at all between the German government and that of the American government. Perhaps for me the most striking photo of the fall of 2001 was one of the former lawyer for the Red Army faction, member of the Green Party and someone once deeply involved in the West German new left, Otto Schilly, who now is the equivalent of the attorney general. Schilly was standing next to Attorney General Ashcroft, announcing their common struggle against terrorism. The Germans were profoundly embarrassed, to say the least, by the fact that they didn't roll up the Hamburg cell before the attacks. From what I've heard, the cooperation between the FBI and the German intelligence services in the war against terrorism has been close and enduring.
On the other hand, it was profoundly sobering to me to see the response in Germany and in Europe to Arafat's rejection of Barak's offer in the fall and winter of 2000. From reading the European press, one got the impression that it was Ariel Sharon who was responsible for the breakdown of the negotiations. This was sobering. I think the differences between us regarding radical Islam have to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many people in Europe think that the real reason that September 11 took place and that al Qaeda emerged, was the intransigence of the Israeli government. If only the Israelis were more reasonable, and dismantled a few more settlements, and weren't so nasty to the Palestinians, Osama bin Laden wouldn't have a fan club around the world. There I think they're profoundly mistaken.
Michael Allen: One thing I might add is that I think there are some analogies with the left's response to the emergence of black nationalism in the United States in the late 1960s. There are those on the European left who look at radical Islam and say, well, we don't like the Islam part -- all this medieval mumbo-jumbo -- but at least they're radical. Of course they have this false consciousness and so on and so forth, but we can cream off their best militants and they will in due course become good secular leftists like ourselves.
Second, there is a kind of excessive liberalism among people who have been disabled by ethical relativism. They imagine that they have no right to criticize any form of Islam, even when mobs of young and not so young activists are burning Salman Rushdie's books in the cities of northern England. There is a reticence there to condemn this, let alone to mobilize against it. Of course, if this had been a bunch of neo-Nazis burning Jewish literature, then there would have been a huge outcry.
Third, of course, our enemy's enemy is our friend. Radical Islam is vehemently anti-Israel. As you know, we've talked a lot about anti-Americanism. I don't want to exaggerate this, but there are those on the left like Tom Paulin the British poet, who's not merely an obscure poet but sits weekly on the BBC's flagship cultural program. He composed a poem, not just an impromptu remark, in which he equates Israelis on the West Bank with SS auxiliaries, the Einsatzgruppen. Then he says that he would gladly shoot every one of them. These kind of sentiments suggest a kind of unholy alliance between some elements of radical Islam and some elements of the European intelligentsia which needs to be addressed.
Male Speaker: Let me add one more point: there are something like 15 million Muslim immigrants in Western Europe, 5 million in France, another 5 million in Germany and a couple million in Britain. They differ among themselves in many ways. But one thing that is coming out of this is a kind of Westernized, born-again, European Islamic radical. Consider the two Brits who brought suicide bombs into Israel a couple weeks ago. I think there is an open question about the extent to which European politics is influenced by these people. For many of the immigrants, their political energies are no longer directed toward their home countries, but toward the transcendent Arab-Israeli conflict. Identification with the Palestinians is their banner. The extent to which they have already influenced European politics is a good one.
David Twersky: I wanted to ask precisely about that. I understand Pascal Boniface from the French socialists wrote a piece that was widely circulated and got public even though it wasn't intended to be, arguing that the Socialist Party essentially should ditch the Jewish vote and go after the growing Mulsim vote. Although not all of the French Muslim population are citizens, there's an estimated 1.5-2 million votes there. This far eclipses what the Jewish vote can do for the French Socialist Party.
Robert Leiken: Why don't we take a couple more questions and then answer them in block.
Hugh Schwarzberg: Is there a real distinction between New Europe and Old Europe in these matters? Will that change as New Europe begins to have a world in which its Muslim schools are going to be able to teach doctrine in matters as hidden as it appears to be in parts of Western Europe?
Robert Pickus: There's been talk recently about discussions among neoconservatives about how to develop ideas in the strategy report of the Bush administration that dealt with the importance of longer term policies for building a stable peace. Can anyone comment on whether those discussions are going on here? Evidently something's going on in England between neo-conservatives and Blairites.
Marcus Rose: Do you think people in America should encourage Europeans to deal with the imperatives of globalization and neoliberalism without jettisoning their social welfare states? America is seen as a leader in globalization, and is thought to be demanding that European workers work harder for less money. That's bound to engender a lot of anti-Americanism.
Michael Allen: There is a fundamental difference between the European left's and the American left's response to globalization. Contrast, for example, the debates around NAFTA here with the debates there around European integration. The mainstream social democratic and trade union left in Europe took the strategic decision that essentially globalization was going to happen. Although many people on the European left had the view that European economic integration involved a nefarious capitalist plot, the left nevertheless took the decision to get on board the train to try to ensure that economic integration had, to use Euro speak, a social dimension. But the American left has been quite hostile to NAFTA.
A trade union leader in the clothing and textile sector in Europe said to me recently, "We've frankly written off our membership in this sector. It's not a viable sector for us as a trade union to organize. Yes, we will seek to protect the benefits of our members, but frankly all European companies are outsourcing to North Africa as well as to Asia." Those are the facts of life. Europe has to adopt the high-skill, high-wage, high-value added, so-called "high road" strategy for economic growth. So -- there are some fundamental differences in perceptions of globalization within the mainstream left.
Now, about neocons and the Blairite agenda: there are some parallels. There was an article in the New Statesman just last week that suggested there is an emergent sort of neocon tendency within the British center-left. It exaggerated the case, but there are some interesting analogies.
It's possible to compare the Blairites or modernizers in the Labour Party to the Scoop Jackson Democrats, but there is one big difference: we won control of the party. We won the major policy and ideological battles. It was a difficult and tortuous learning experience, but a succession of Labour leaders -- not only Tony Blair but John Smith and Neal Kinnock before him -- realized that the party had grown too distant from its base. In 1983 we even found that a majority of trade union members voted for parties other than the Labour Party.
That brought us to reject not only the more absurd policies, such as unilateral nuclear disarmament. We also adopted much more forceful and realistic policies on law and order, on social policy. Recall Tony Blair's mantra about being tough both on crime and the causes of crime. He also tried to cultivate any kind of pro-business ethos within the Labour Party. Blair famously said that "I came into this party to fight against injustice and poverty, not against wealth." That's one of the reasons why elements of the middle class and the business community have come over to Labour.
There are other parallels. There's a strong element within the British Labour Party and in the government that is in favor of what some people are calling "democratic imperialism." People such as Robert Cooper and John Lloyd, journalists with the Financial Times, have written things that are analogous to arguments made by writers like Sebastian Mallaby in the U.S. Of course, there are still some fundamental differences with neo-cons on issues of economic and social policy. But if we adopt Irving Kristol's definition of a neo-con as a liberal who's been mugged by reality, well, the Labour Party was mugged very violently by reality in the early 1980s, and it's gone through a learning process.
Jeffrey Herf: The British government has an information web site, www.britain-info.org. There you can read Tony Blair's speech of March 18 in the House of Commons. It is, I think, the most eloquent and important argument regarding the war in Iraq. Jack Straw's speeches at the UN and elsewhere are also there.
I want to address the Bush Administration's national security doctrine, make a comment about political language. The Iraqi government is probably not going to be the last experience with an aggressive totalitarian regime that we'll have in the 21st century. For many years I've held a view that is noted in the Bush national security statement: the main threat to Europe and the United States is the rapid spread of technology around a world that has hot spots of radicalism. Technology spreads much more rapidly than common sense, certainly more rapidly than liberal institutions.
If that's the case, I see nothing neo-conservative about a security doctrine that says that we must address these regimes before they can attack us or their neighbors. The ease with which people associate these kinds of policies with neo-conservatism puts liberals on the defensive. That's why it's important to remember Franklin Roosevelt. If Roosevelt were alive today, he would see nothing neo-conservative about confronting such threats to our security, even though many others don't want to face them.
This battle over our political language is not a small battle. It is something that professors or intellectuals or journalists are paid to take part in, and we will fight this battle. But it's also an important battle to be fought in the Democratic Party. It will have to be fought if, as Donna Brazile suggested
this morning, if Democrats are to have a chance to win national elections again.
Andrei Markovits: Acouple of words about globalization and about social welfare and the New Europe/Old Europe.
The best piece written on globalization to this day is Marx's Communist Manifesto. Globalization is nothing new. If you look at the transition at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the dislocations were much more stark than what is going on now. We are seeing yet another transformation of capitalism, in which the new forces of production, as Jeff said, move much more quickly than social and political relations. I assume that many of you are conversant with this Marxist jargon. Technology moves a hell of a lot quicker than culture and the building of institutions.
What is interesting, however--this brings me to the point about the social contract -- is that so many people are willing to see this carried out on the backs of workers. This approach is not only an American policy, although that's what is often claimed. In fact, those who claim tthis in many ways give European governments a free ride they don't deserve.
Now: New Europe/Old Europe. It wasn't Rumsfeld's word so much as his dismissive body language that made that comment so provocative. But the fact that there is a New Europe is not wrong. I did my initial work in European politics from '77 until the early '90s. Then, Europe was basically the big four: Germany, France, Italy, the U.K. That's Old Europe.
Well, we are now reconfiguring American political science departments. The East and Center are back in Europe.
Now, does this mean that New Europe will deal with the Islamic question the way the Old Europe did because in Eastern Europe you don't have the Islamic minority populations as you have in the Old Europe? Obviously electoral strategy has influenced the attitude toward Islamism in France. Interestingly, not in Germany, because the citizenship laws are different. Add to this, of course, that in Germany the Islamic population is still disproportionately Turkish, while in France it's mainly Arabic.
But the problem is not just one of strategy. What is happening is a kind of moral and intellectual accommodation to Islamism. These countries are democracies where intellectuals actually matter. Discourse that goes on in sometimes obscure journals is not sometimes reflected in governments. And that discourse involves a kind of relativization including an acceptance of anti-Semitic incidents, which are in the main perpetrated not by native Frenchmen but by Islamic minorities.
Perhaps toleration is too strong a term. There's just not a forceful outcry. Let me put it crudely. One German author once described something called “die schonzeit,” a word that comes from the world of hunting. It means the non-shooting season. It refers to the post-Holocaust era, between 1945 and 2000. Now this period is starting to fade away. This does not mean that there will be pogroms in Western Europe. This does not mean that there will be massive, interwar-period anti-Semitic outbursts. But what it does mean is that “die schonzeit,” this era of non-hunting, this period of taboo-ization, is gradually falling away. Attitudes that in the late '60s and early '70s were still confined to the anti-Zionist critique are now becoming an anti-Jewish critique.
If you study mass culture and sports as I do, you can see a new attitude seeping into European culture, coming up from underneath.
This has something to do with the Islamic minority which these governments have failed to deal with in any meaningful way. They have ignored them, treated them as guest workers. They were ghettoized, they were mistreated. Now it's starting to haunt Europe. What is happening is that these Muslim minorities are not addressing themselves to issues which involve the polity at hand, the polity that has mistreated them. The issues are not what's happening in some voting process in a Paris banlieu or how Turks should push to attain German citizenship. Politicization involves expressing themselves in a kind of anti-Western, Islamist way, which was not so evident ten year ago.
Robert Leiken: Just to add a point, there is a French sociologist and student of Islamic populations in Europe who thinks that radicalized second and third generation Muslim immigrants who live in the banlieus and often don't have good jobs have become the heirs of the left and the communist movement. Thus the radical Islamic movement centered among Muslim immigrants is the heir in a direct sense of the last totalitarian movement in Europe.
Let's group a few more last questions. Let's focus on where things ought to go. A question I have is, how many intellectuals are there out there in Europe who are unhappy with the dominant attitudes, and are these people who are in touch with one another or could be put in touch with one another?
Ira Strauss: Andrei Markovits mentioned anti-Westernism. Aren't we misnaming the phenomenon? Isn't anti-Americanism also a guise for anti-Westernism?
Don't we have some Americans who are also anti-West?
Isn't the solution to strengthen the ties among both Europeans and Americans who defend the West?
Sam Leiken: Mike Allen talked about the labor movement and its historic role opposing totalitarianism. In the 1980s the labor movement in the UK moved toward social partnership and opposed unilateral disarmament and all that.
But the direction labor is taking in the U.S. is very much the opposite. The Henry Jackson elements in the labor movement are no longer in the leadership and those now setting the direction are much more left-wing.
Now we also see more militants coming forward in the UK labor movement. Labor in the U.S. and, increasingly, in the UK both oppose Tony Blair and George Bush in Iraq. Given what you say about the historic role of labor in opposing totalitarianism and labor's recent performance on Iraq, hasn't there been a change?
Joe Ryan: In addition to the Tony Blair wing of the British Labour Party, are there any other people in Europe on the center-left that we should be working with?
Tony Friedman: One theme I heard here this morning is that one common thread that links radical Islam with the anti-globalization and anti-American left is fear of American hegemony. What can bridge the gap between the U.S. and European left? Could one element be the democratization and global integration of the Middle East and the Arab worlds?
Boris Mussienko: I'm from Democracy International. Let me share a view from a dark corner of Europe, the Balkans, and, in particular from Yugoslavia. There is a real growth in the social democratic movement in Yugoslavia, and it wants to reach out to its counterparts in America. Capitalism has again become a dirty word over there. Anti-Americanism is growing because they see globalization as a new, predatory type of unbridled capitalism. Are there any political leaders in Europe we could contact to help us spread democratic values? We have an open door, if we make an effort.
Michael Allen: I'll start by responding to Sam Leiken's question, which was directed specifically at me. As people say, context is all. The labor movement's strategic trajectory in Britain was conditioned by a particular set of circumstances that don't apply in the United States. You've heard about the Egyptian chiefs of staff who got together after yet another defeat by Israel, and decided to blame their Soviet advisers. The Egyptians complained that the Soviets had advised them to retreat into their own territory and wait for the winter. Strategies don't necessarily travel well.
Although the Blairites, the modernizers, have achieved hegemony, as it were, in the British labor movement, it's a pretty thin and fragile enterprise. Tony Blair is tolerated by the Labour Party, not loved by the Labour Party. Those of us who consider ourselves modernizers have failed to develop a base in the party and in the unions, for a whole set of reasons.
This is why it's important for us to devise a project rooted in a new conception of social democracy, based on rigorous commitment to democracy and opposition to the residues of Marxism that still infect even the British Labour Party.
Anti-Americanism is one of these residues. There has even been something of a resurgence of the hard left or the far left in the British trade unions lately.
So Blair is relatively fragile. Blair's personal politics have something to do with this. There isn't a Blair faction because Blair is a rigorously non-ideological politician. He did not go through, as many of us did, some experience with the organized, Marxist left. He did not imbibe all the dogma, the jargon, or the organizational technique.
Blair's principal intellectual influence was an obscure Scottish theologian and philosopher named John McMurray, who wrote in the 1930s. He was a kind of Amitai Etzione lite, a premature communitarian, who talked about the identity of the individual self and the social self and so on. That approach essentially informs Blair's foreign policy and internationalism. If you read Blair's speech to the House of Commons on Iraq, if you read Blair's speech in Chicago about 18 months ago, they are predicated on the notion that there is a global community. They are predicated upon notions of interdependence, of mutuality, and they even sound a little Hillary Clinton-esque, perhaps uncomfortably so for some of us here. Some might say it's intellectually vapid, and it is. But it helps explain why there hasn't been any organizational effort to back it up. This we need to develop.
This brings us to the question, who else is there on the center-left? Frankly, if you're talking about the leading figures, nobody really comes to mind. Gordon Brown is more of old labor, what we would call unreconstructed, traditional labor. On foreign policy he shares many of Tony Blair's precepts and politics, but he's primarily motivated by a compelling ambition to be prime minister himself. Once he gets into that position, nobody's quite sure where he'll be.
There is, however, a younger generation. There are aspiring leaders -- if you will, proto-Blair-ites -- in social democratic parties in Europe, who are dismissive of the notion of a global left. Most of them say, as Tony Blair himself once said, "I am not a socialist." Many of the younger generation of modernizers in European left parties, although they say that they are informed by left traditions, even say explicitly that they are not social democrats. They're post-social democrats, they're modernizers. They come from the radical center. They'll come up with any kind of formulation that distinguishes them from the left.
It's this group, which is still intellectually and politically unformed, which has got to be a principal target of our efforts. Furthermore, those of us who hope to develope a new kind of democratic internationalism shouldn't restrict ourselves to the center-left. If you look at France for example, the more compelling and energetic arguments are coming from people who stand in a tradition of Raymond Aron: Glucksman, Levy and so forth. We shouldn't be sectarian about our strategic direction.
Jeffrey Herf: Perhaps we should worry much less about anti-Americanism than we do. Alliances are based not only on common values, but also on common perceptions of interests and threats. Our goal is not that Old Europe or New Europe love everything about the United States. A lot of what's called anti-Americanism, if translated into American politics, is something that we could read in the editorial pages of the Washington Post or the New York Times.
The fundamental issue is whether or not the governments of Europe share the perceptions of the United States about serious threats to our national security: Islamic radicalism, North Korea, Iraq in the past – the list can go on. This is a perception that there are governments that have recently emerged or may emerge which share some of the worst features of the most dangerous governments of Europe's mid-20th century. If the Europeans don't like our movies or our gun laws, well, I don't either. What I care about is that they share our views that there are dangerous people out there who will sometimes not respond to anything but the credible threat of military response.
If the Democratic Party cannot convince the American electorate that if it faced a threat like that from Iraq its President that would have pulled the trigger, it's a Secretary of Defense who would have put together a military strategy that would have won the war, and its a Secretary of State who would have to rally the United Nations in support of the war – if the Democratic Party cannot convince the electorate that it would have gone to war and won the war -- then it's not going to win elections for a long time to come. It's as simple as that.
In terms of our friends in Europe, they may come from unexpected places. Andy Markovits spoke at the Green conference in 2001. Some members of the Green Party, including Foreign Minister Fischer, understand what I just said. Some of the members of the Green Party, even more than members of the Social Democratic Party, understand that there are dangers in the world that evoke dangers of mid-century Europe. These are nasty people who won't respond to confidence-building measures and Euro speak and all that.
Here in Washington it would make sense to talk to people at the Heinrich Boell Foundation, the political foundation of the Green Party. You may find some unexpected agreement there. Andy knows more about that than I do. Those of you who have experience in the labor movement talk to your friends in the German labor movement. Evoke the traditions of the European labor movement when it participated in the struggle against fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. It was not simply conservative traditions that defeated the Nazis and the Italian fascists or the Japanese imperialists. It was traditions that are part of the labor movement both the U.S. and in Europe. If these traditions are not so active today, they're latent, and they can be reawakened. Or so I hope.
Andrei Markovits: I have little to add to the eloquent summary and appeal that Jeff made. But it won't be easy. Over the last few years in the institutions that he's mentioned – the German labor movement, the Green Party and others-- a negativism has developed that puts people who would be willing to engage in a dialogue with us in the minority.
Joschka Fischer is a person who shares the vision that Jeff just delineated—as I do to. But in his party at the moment, he is in the minority. He's surrounded by people who see anything coming from the United States through the lens provided by Michael Moore.
Is this permanent? I hope not. Clearly it was exacerbated by the current American Administration. The language matters. The tone makes the music. Will common interest ultimately prevail? Of course. Again, the investment figures of the Netherlands speak volumes. But this will be a very rocky alliance, and it will have to be renegotiated, and it will take time.
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Session III: LUNCHEON DISCUSSION
LABOR HERITAGE MAGAZINE
Penn Kemble: I want to say something to you about Social Democrats, USA, and other themes of this event. But first I want to introduce Mike Merrill, who is the editor of a magazine that many of us found quite refreshing and interesting. It's called Labor Heritage, and it's published by the George Meany Center. We want to give Mike a chance to say something about it.
Mike Merrill: Thank you, Penn. I'm Mike Merrill, Director of the George Meany Archives. Some of you might have known Stuart Kaufman, who was the director of the archives until he died about five years ago. There has been no Director between his passing and my hiring in January of 2002. Labor Heritage is a publication that was begun by the archives. If we dug deeply enough we'd probably find Tom Donahue responsible for it, so I should thank him here.
We've begun to publish a series of theme issues. The current issue is on U.S. labor in times of war, and it has articles surveying the role of the labor movement in wartime, from 1776 to the present. There is an article about Sam Gompers in World War I, and an article about the solidarity efforts between the Vietnamese trade union movement and the AFL-CIO during the Vietnam conflict which is very interesting.
It takes an unconventional look at the Vietnam War and how the AFL-CIO was drawn to support that effort, not out of an ideological commitment to abstract anti-communism, but out of on-the-ground solidarity between the trade unionists of both countries.
I'm also involved with something called the National Labor College. The George Meany Center for Labor Studies is now an accredited upper division institution, giving bachelor's degrees in labor studies. We have 1,500 or so students now, and we've graduated about 500 labor leaders over the last four or five years. I see at least one current student in the room.
The National Labor College is part of an effort on our part to change the public perception of the labor movement. From our point of view, it's valuable to have an accredited college, the National Labor College, provide working people with recognition for skills and knowledge that they acquire on the job.
Labor Heritage magazine is the magazine of the National Labor College. There are copies in the back but, because of their high production values, I can't give them away. Our most recent issue is on labor feminism. Our effort throughout is to reinsert the labor movement into America's larger story. For example, it's my belief that the most important event in U.S. labor history was the Civil War, and that we need to help people see labor's role in that as an important part of the larger story.
Thank you, Penn.
Penn Kemble: I have to especially commend the article on the AFL-CIO's role in support of the trade union confederation in South Vietnam in the current issue. That piece helps enormously for understanding what George Meany and Lane Kirkland did during the war in Vietnam. It's extremely valuable when so many people are confused about just what labor's role was in the Cold War, and in particular during the Vietnam period.
"NEO-SOCIAL DEMOCRATS"
Penn Kemble: I want to say something about Social Democrats, USA, and about the purposes that led us to bring this group together this weekend. I'm pleased that Jim Pinkerton is here, who can claim credit for giving currency to the term “new paradigm” during the Reagan Administration. We flirted with using that term in convening this meeting.
Instead, I proposed the term "neo-social democrats." This caused some disquiet among my colleagues, who felt it smacked too much of other neo-named movements, and might confuse our image. We even considered “Neo-Social Democrats: The Matrix Reloaded,” especially because the hero of that action film is named “Neo.”
I was told such pop culture allusions would trivialize a very serious subject.
So you'll see a short document on the back table, with the inoffensive title "The New Social Democrats." I encourage you all to take a look at it. (The document can be found at www.socialdemocrats.org.) It's not yet an official statement of SD-USA, it's intended to encourage discussion among our friends and members and whatever wider public we can engage. We think it is time for a new discussion about social democracy. Our paper focuses just on two t