The last gasp of social democracy

When the European Commission and Europe's most powerful finance minister resign within a week, it's safe to say something important is happening in European politics.

Political institutions always take a long time to catch up with larger and more diffuse social and cultural changes. And if they take too long, they can fall quite suddenly. We saw this in eastern Europe. We saw it in Ireland with the simultaneous implosion of church and State in the mid-1990s. We see it now with the grand fabric of post-war European managerial politics.

To an extent, what we are witnessing is the last gasp of old-style European social democracy. The fall of Oskar Lafontaine certainly marks the end of a certain kind of leftism. Lafontaine was not just Germany's finance minister, he was also the most important keeper of the social democratic flame.

He had all the right enemies: the Sun, the technocrats who think an economy exists to service the stock markets, the bankers and corporate leaders who believe the business of Europe is business and that democracy is an unnecessary distraction. But he discovered that having the right enemies is not enough. You have to understand their strengths and choose your battles. If you don't, you get a sharp lesson in where power really lies now.

But if Lafontaine's fate is a parable of the weakness of mere ideological passion, the fall of the Commission tells the other side of the story. It shows what happens when you take the ideology out of politics. For it, too, is a product of the death of the old social democracy.

At the heart of the crisis is the ridiculous Edith Cresson. She, in turn, is the creature of French socialism in the hollow, decadent days of Francois Mitterrand's half-baked retreat from ideology in the 1980s.

That an absurd martinet like Cresson, full of swagger, incompetence and prejudice, should have become prime minister of what was then Europe's leading socialist government was a mark of how low the left had sunk. In common with much of the French leadership of the time, she demonstrated an uncanny ability to dump all the good things in socialism - the rage against injustice and the willingness to grapple with the systems that underpin it - while retaining all the bad things, such as the arrogance of command.

And she showed that leaders who abandon their ideological principles are apt to lose any sense of principle at all. Socialism minus ideological passion, as the history of the French, Belgian, Spanish, Greek and Italian socialist parties in the late 1980s and early 1990s has shown, all too clearly equals corruption.

The drift towards venality begins the loss of faith in the ideals which once motivated political involvement. To take power and to hold it means compromising, manoeuvring, settling for what can be done rather than what ought to be done. It requires spinning, projecting images, creating a public persona that is blander, less complex, than the real one.

It requires a certain amount of deception and self-deception. It is very easy, in the midst of this process, to fill the vacuum of disillusionment with the pleasures of power and the pursuit of luxury.

And it isn't easy to keep a balance between necessary compromise and flagrant opportunism. Too little pragmatism and you fail. Too much and you rot away. Too little and you betray your ideals by pushing them too far. Too much and you have no ideals left to betray. Too little and you end up like Lafontaine. Too much and you end up like Cresson.

There is something larger going on here as well. The great paradox of European politics at the moment is that socialists can have power so long as they give up what used to be called socialism. The electorates of western Europe seem to prefer to be governed from the left. They grew tired of the shrill politics of the new right and understood at last that the Thatcherite rhetoric of freedom was little more than a cloak for the pursuit of short-term self-interest by the rich and the would-be rich.

They saw, too, that the right-wing announcements of the death of the state were premature and that the role of government in ensuring that there is such a thing as society is crucial to ordinary lives. The calmer, more benevolent demeanour of the moderate left is closer to the aspirations of the European majority.

But there is little interest in all the things the left used to carry with it: central planning, state ownership, top-down leadership by the enlightened elite, social engineering. In the complex, open societies that have evolved in the West, with the role of the nation-state weakened and power increasingly dispersed, governments just don't rule in the same way any more.

Even the German finance minister, as Lafontaine discovered, is weaker than the international stock markets, the banking elites, the right-wing media and, above all, the voracious, restless and mobile force of global capital.

The European Commission, for its part, has always operated like a paternalistic old social democratic government. It has been the greatest example of a top-down, largely unaccountable governing elite. And it has fallen as suddenly as the old communist elites of eastern Europe; brought down, like them, by its own irresponsibility, inertia and venality.

For what has happened this week is not really about Edith Cresson giving a sinecure to her dentist. It is about all the underlying structures and attitudes that made it possible for her to imagine that she could do so with impunity. Existing above and beyond any real democracy, the Commission has gone the way of all undemocratic elites in the developed world.

It's important, therefore, that the fall of the Commission not be treated merely as a temporary institutional problem, to be patched up and forgotten. A new and better Commission is needed. But it is not enough. The underlying political culture of social democracy - the culture that feeds the whole European project - has to be reinvented.

If they are to find a workable balance between passion and pragmatism, socialists have to think of themselves first and last as democrats. They have to see a deeper, more radical democracy as their goal. They have to argue for social equality as the basis for a genuinely democratic society.

And they have to stop treating ideology as a dirty word. The left has spent so much time trimming its sails to the prevailing winds that it no longer knows what voyage it's on. It has spent so much time apologising for its beliefs that it has forgotten that it still has some.

It has been so anxious to "reassure" voters that it has not mentioned the guiding principles that it will not sacrifice for power. Very few voters, after all, really believe Europe's new generation of social democratic leaders are wild Bolsheviks plotting to expropriate their Toyotas. But they might actually be glad to learn they do believe in something.