Mélanie Torrent and Andrew J. Williams, eds, European Socialists Across Borders: Transnational Cooperation and Alternative Visions of Europe after 1945
Ford, G. (no date) ‘Mélanie Torrent and Andrew J. Williams, eds, European Socialists Across Borders: Transnational Cooperation and Alternative Visions of Europe after 1945’, in Socialist History.
Mélanie Torrent and Andrew J. Williams, eds, European Socialists Across Borders: Transnational Cooperation and Alternative Visions of Europe after 1945, University of London Press, London, 2025; 272 pp.; ISBN 9781915249739, free as PDF, other formats available.
Torrent and Williams corral together eight eclectic chapters under the rubric of Europe’s socialists and cross-border co-operation. At least a couple look like strays rounded up by accident. Chronologically they stretch back to the fall of France in 1940 and forward to the turn of the century. Three, in their very different ways, cover Anglo-French relations with, in one case, a heavy flavouring of federalism. Two are partial political biographies, the first of Europe’s pre-eminent expert on African decolonisation, Basil Davidson, and the second of Swedish Prime Minister, Olaf Palme, and his temerity in challenging Washington’s criminal enterprise in Vietnam. The last look to policy rather than personality: the left lean away from Israel towards Palestine in the seventies and early eighties; anti-racism on the European stage; Socialist grand plans to tackle EU unemployment.
The most interesting is Ben Heckscher and Tommaso Milani’s ‘Mouvement Socialist pour les État-Unis d’Europe’ which looks at how Britain’s anti-Stalinist revolutionary left in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) sowed from the early 1940’s the seeds of federalism in first their domestic and subsequently their European campaigning for a United Socialist States of Europe. Close engagement found the ILP wanting in resources and influence. Hijacked by their French friends, it rapidly evolved, the Movement for a Socialist United States of Europe became the Socialist Movement for a United States of Europe and then de facto the left wing of the European Movement. Their third way of neither Washington nor Moscow was killed with kindness after the announcement of the Marshall Plan in 1947. Western Europeans became the willing wards of Washington.
The converse – not that it lacks interest – is ‘Black British Labour Leaders and the Europeanisation of antiracism’ which fails to see the wood for the trees; focussing on the epiphenomena and missing the central characters almost entirely. Bernie Grant MP and two French MEPs, Djida Tazdait and Nora Zaidi, are selected as champions, with the two French identified as Green Party members, even although Zaidi was elected to the European Parliament (EP) on the French Socialist Party list. The piece misses the foreplay. European anti-racism was woken up by the emergence of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National and their breakthrough in the 1984 EP Elections.
The result on the streets was the delivery of hundreds of thousands, in France and beyond, rallying behind Harlem Désir, SOS Racisme and their slogan ‘touche pas mon pote’, while in the EP a Committee of Enquiry was established into ‘The Growth of Racism and Fascism in Europe’ that proposed giving the EU clear competence to act against racial discrimination. In 1989 there was a second Committee of Enquiry into Racism and Xenophobia in the context of 1992, followed by a Council of Ministers Consultative Committee on Racism and Xenophobia. All of which led to the demanded Amsterdam Treaty changes. Both Tazdait and Zaidi were active members of that second EP Committee of Enquiry. All of whose work warrants, apparently, only a single lonely footnote.
The Labour Party and its relations with the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (French Socialist Party) saw the wartime attempts to build a bipartite Anglo-French united front against the post-war economic threats from Germany and the US, while avoiding civil war in a fractured France. The second proved easier than the first. The third French engagement concerns the role played by individual MPs in Britain under pressure from the former resistance leader, Claude Bourdet, in pressing France’s Socialists to return to respecting human rights law in the brutal Algerian War. Basil Davidson’s influence and reputation are put to the question by his alleged too-close affinity with the Soviet bloc; despite all the signals to the contrary, while Olaf Palme’s apostasy benefits from heavy behind the scenes support from his fellow socialist leaders in Austria and Germany, Bruno Kreisky and Willy Brandt. Palme speaks for all three in his condemnations; words gagged by the hard politics of Vienna and Bonn.
The European left was besotted with Israel for a long quarter of a century after Victory in Europe. It was as much driven by guilt for what they had failed to do in the thirties and forties, as by admiration for what Israeli socialists were doing in real time. The ousting of the Israeli Labour Party from power and the increasing discriminations against the Arab population inside and outside the state saw a sea-change. Tel Aviv cried ‘wolf’ too often. Self-defence can be an offence. No longer was Israel the poster boy for socialism, even if the true extent of its derelictions took decades to acknowledge.
The last – but far from least – is two attempts to arrive at a common policy for jobs within the EU socialist family. In 1985 the Willy Claes working group for the timorous Confederation of the Socialist Parties of the European Com-munity (CSPEC) produced ‘More Jobs for Europe’. It fell on deaf ears. Its Keynesian message was considered outdated and its very European nature saw a British Labour Party, still committed to jumping off the European ship at the first opportunity, determined to water down its federalist message. Eight years later CSPEC’s successor – the Party of European Socialists (PES) – did better. Allan Larsson, former Swedish Minister of Finance, saw his PES working group propose a ‘European Employment Initiative’ that was promoted by socialist Commission President, Jacques Delors, and was still recognizable in the em-ployment title in the Amsterdam Treaty. Mathieu Fulla explains the very different receptions. The PES has a seriousness missing from its predecessor, Neil Kinnock had brought the Labour Party and its MEPs, who had spent the previous years sat on their bags waiting to leave, fully into the system, and most importantly its flavour had the faint bitterness of austerity that now chimed with social democracy’s concessions to a monetarist agenda.
European Socialists Across Borders is a miscellany of topics across time and space. Most will serve to spur further work in frankly what is a sadly neglected area of Labour history, particularly in Britain. Nevertheless, as someone who served in the Socialist Group in the EP between 1984-2009, I see it more as an opportunity missed than an opportunity seized; where the whole is less than the sum of the parts.
Glyn Ford