Dark Continent, page 42
THE LEFT IN DECLINE?
As ever, it was largely a matter of perspective. Left-wing parties suffered in north-west Europe, but held their ground in Scandinavia and prospered in southern Europe: Mitterrand, Craxi, Gonzáles and Papandreou, for instance, all held power during the 1980s. At the beginning of the 1990s, eleven of sixteen west European social democratic parties were in power—more than at any time since 1945. Overall, there was no decline in social democracy electorally; if anything, concluded the author of a searching examination of the subject, what required explanation was “the striking stability of the social democratic vote.”17
In retrospect, the “crisis” of social democracy in the 1980s reflected other factors. Electorates tended to punish whoever had been in government in the late 1970s: Kohl and Thatcher profited on the Right, but equally so did Mitterrand and Papandreou. The second was that the policy environment had changed, and become far less favourable to traditional Keynesian state-led national recovery plans: Mitterrand and Papandreou both tried this and were forced back into “austerity” and “rigueur.” Hence socialists and social democrats had to find new approaches to their traditional goals of social equity and workers’ rights; for many, these would lead to Brussels. As a result, some would argue that Leftists in government in the 1980s were not really pursuing socialism. It is certainly true that Mitterrand was indeed implementing a state-led “socialism without workers,” while in Spain and Greece, the socialists won because they offered the prospect of full-scale social renewal and national reconciliation after authoritarian rule and civil war. In all three countries, the Left adopted a national mission and avoided being labelled as a labourist movement. But this was not only a reflection of the specific political pasts they faced: it was also because the workers were disappearing as a class. Across western Europe the old, organized working class was following the peasantry into history. This was where the real crisis was taking place.
Whereas the evidence for a political “revolution” in western Europe after 1973 is at best patchy, there can be no disputing the scale of the changes which were taking place in society and the economy. Preeminent among these were the related phenomena of de-industrialization and the declining power of organized labour. De-industrialization hit the headlines in the UK with the decimation of British manufacturing in the first three years of Mrs Thatcher’s government, when no fewer than one million manufacturing jobs were lost. To a large extent this drop was the product of astonishing economic mismanagement, and in particular of an overvalued exchange rate. Nevertheless, a longer-term secular decline in the relative importance of the industrial sector was taking place more widely.
From the late 1960s the absolute size of the industrial workforce started to decline in western Europe. Between 1960 and 1985 it fell as a proportion of the total labour force from 47.7 per cent to 32.3 per cent in the UK, from 47 per cent to 41 per cent in the FDR, from 40 per cent to 26.5 per cent in the Netherlands. Southern Europe followed suit about a decade later: from 36.1 per cent to 31.8 per cent between 1980 and 1985 in Spain, for instance. Industrial output fell as a proportion of GDP. European output was also falling over this period as a proportion of world industrial output, indicating the difficulty countries faced in keeping up with international levels of competitiveness, especially against Asian newcomers.
Many of the great centres of European industrialization fell into decline: coal and textiles were among the first industries to be hit, followed by shipbuilding, steel and car production. Not surprisingly, social theorists—in an ironic echo of Mrs Thatcher herself—were quick to spot the onset of “post-industrial” society, sometimes overlooking the vital role industry and manufacturing in particular continued to play in the economy. For while some traditional heavy industries suffered “restructuring,” others such as electronics and pharmaceuticals prospered. The drop in industrial value added was far less than in employment. Long-term economic well-being continued to depend on such factors as the level of investment in training, research and development. Nevertheless, the overall decline of industry sent shock-waves through society.18
In the first place, it radically altered the nature of union power, shifting the balance away from the old centres of working-class activism—the mines, docks and railways—towards white-collar, technical and especially public-sector unions. Unionization rates fell in some countries—France and Spain (where they had traditionally been low, anyway), the Netherlands and the UK—but not everywhere: they remained high, for example, in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Belgium where corporatist pay bargaining continued.
Mass unemployment reduced the effectiveness of strike action. In the 1980s there were only sporadic strikes on a large scale, and their outcomes tended to be at best ambiguous (the I. G. Metall strike in West Germany), at worst clear defeats (the NUM in the UK in 1984). When the great Fiat strike unfolded in Turin in 1980 shortly after the Solidarity movement emerged in Poland, the limits of industrial action in the West became obvious: unlike Solidarity, the Fiat workers found that their popularity was constrained by internal division and the sense that they were fighting for their own interests, not those of the nation. Fiat managers mounted a successful counter-demonstration, and the disillusioned strikers were forced back to work. “Have you seen what they’ve managed to do in Poland since they’ve got the backing of all the workers?” exclaimed one. “We know that in Italy, in a country like Italy, we can never have the backing, and above all the physical and moral participation of all the workers; within the working class today there are conflicting interests.”19 Thus labour’s share of income fell from the mid-1970s onwards, and most union leaders realized that this could not be reversed. Their continued influence depended not merely upon their own actions, but also upon the willingness of employers and government to accept them as partners.
These trends were connected with broader shifts in labour patterns and the very meaning of work. Large corporations promising long-term employment to a largely male workforce were gradually replaced by smaller companies with short-term contracts, employing an increasingly female staff. “Flexibilization” and the rise of part-time work, the growth of unregulated “black economies,” together with the destruction of the old blue-collar labour aristocracy, led some commentators to mourn the passing of the working class. “Did the working class ever exist at all?” asked Blackwell and Seabrook in their 1996 study of changing work practices. Certainly it was no longer the heroic protagonist at the heart of European politics that it had been for a century, much less the vanguard of revolution. Collective working-class rituals such as the May Day festival were petering out; a study of the sales figures for May Day badges in Sweden showed figures rising from the 1960s until the early 1980s and then declining precipitously. Elsewhere the decline set in even earlier.20
Work itself was assuming a different significance in people’s lives. As we have seen, for both communism and fascism work had occupied a central place, both as right and as duty, in their claim to have superseded liberal democracy: work was redemption from uselessness and an entry-ticket into the community, an idea parodied even on the gate into Auschwitz with its mocking slogan “Arbeit macht frei.” Post-war liberal democracy had responded to the challenge by itself guaranteeing the right to work, a commitment enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights and realized in the full-employment policies of the post-war years.
Suddenly there were no longer jobs for all. It began to look as though full employment had been nothing but what Göran Therborn called “a strange experience in the history of capitalism.”21 Mass unemployment and the rise of social-security spending meant that work and income were less directly connected than ever before in modern history. In the UK, for example, income from work as a proportion of gross household income fell from more than 80 per cent of the total in the mid-1970s to 73 per cent by 1982.22
The spread of higher education and the pressure to take early retirement, combined with increasing longevity and longer paid holidays, meant that an ever-larger portion of people’s lives was spent outside paid work (unpaid housework remained inescapable for many women). Sociologists observed a waning work ethic as people sought satisfaction and fulfilment outside work rather than inside it, and tried to husband their energies for their free time. Polls indicated that in 1962 only 33 per cent of Germans preferred leisure over work; by 1979 the figure had risen to 48 per cent. German newspapers became alarmed: “We are not idle,” ran a headline in Bild Zeitung. Such attitudes reflected the fact that on average even those in work spent as much time in a year outside the workplace as at it. But they also showed the great contrast between the rapidity of economic change and the persistence of deeply rooted ethical traditions which associated idleness and leisure with moral deficiency.23
Mass unemployment emerged in the mid-1970s and remained a major social problem in the following decade, despite economic recovery and the creation of jobs in the service sector. By the early 1990s, unemployment averaged 11–12 per cent in the EU, and totalled some eighteen million people. Yet this figure, unimaginable to most people twenty years earlier, was accompanied by very little serious unrest. Certainly there was no parallel to events in the early 1930s, and no fundamental challenge to the political order. That this was so must surely be attributed to the continued resilience of the welfare state in cushioning society, even—or perhaps especially—after the ending of the post-war boom.
LOSING OUT
Compared with two decades earlier, however, people had come to accept high levels of poverty and inequality. Over forty-five million people—some 14 per cent of the population—were living in poverty in the EU by the late 1980s, 17 per cent by 1993—a figure comparable with the situation in the USA, and a striking contrast with the egalitarian “tiger economies” of East Asia. In the UK, thanks to monetarism and tax breaks for the rich, the rise was particularly glaring—Mrs Thatcher had urged people to “glory in inequality”—reversing nearly half a century’s trend the other way. As Gilmour put it acidly, “trickle down” policies had actually produced “an upward trickle.” The leading British scholar of income distribution stated bluntly that “the 1980s have seen a departure from the historical trend, with a definite rise in inequality.” By the 1990s the UK was the most unequal society in the Western world, with around fourteen million living in poverty, including over four million children, but other west European countries were heading in the same direction.24
It was not long before the poor were—as in the past—being blamed for their misfortune: declining faith in social engineering naturally encouraged more moralistic and individualistic explanations of poverty. During the inter-war slump, conservative eugenicists had talked of the “social problem group.” Now the idea reappeared in a new guise: the “underclass.” According to the American Charles Murray, the leading propagandist for the term, this identified not the degree but a type of poverty. Single mothers—an increasingly impoverished group—were attacked for scrounging off the welfare state, and the unemployed were accused—despite scholarly evidence refuting the idea—of preferring generous handouts to proper work at low wages. Such accusations helped justify cuts in child allowances and supplementary benefits, as well as schemes which tied welfare entitlements to workfare. Another growing section of the “new poor”—the elderly—were suffering, first in Britain, later elsewhere, from the fall in the real value of state pensions. For those who most needed it, the welfare safety net was looking threadbare, inadequate and unfocused in the benefits it offered.
Impoverishment had its own geography. As the old industrial heartlands—the Clyde and the north-east of England, the Ruhr—fell into decline, jobs and people tilted towards the suburbs or other regions. In 1980s Germany, for instance, there was the “Nord-Sud Gefälle”—the Great Trek to the South. The destitution of the Italian Mezzogiorno contrasted more strikingly than ever with the wealth of the Veneto and Emilia, whose inhabitants’ protectionism expressed itself in large votes for the autonomist Lega. Those left behind found themselves stranded in pockets of high unemployment. People started to talk of “inner cities” as zones of social tension and poverty. Within cities, housing patterns also changed as those in work abandoned public housing estates: by the 1990s, council houses were inhabited overwhelmingly by the poor, something which had not been true a decade or so earlier. Homelessness was on the increase too, and by the early 1990s had reached the staggering figure of three million across the European Union.
As poverty increased, and the gulf widened between those in and out of work, prison populations also rose—unevenly but persistently—across western Europe. We need not follow Marxist penologists who argue that capitalism uses prison as a means of labour discipline and a way of keeping public order, to see possible connections between social distress and a return to hardline law-and-order policies. As ever, the poor were most at risk of imprisonment; white-collar theft, corruption and fraud were rarely regarded as “real” crimes, despite the enormous sums of money involved—£6 billion from EU subsidies alone. Effectively, the crimes of the economically powerful were left to the margins of policing work.
So far as crime was concerned, there were two possibilities: either the figures were unreliable or there actually was more crime. The unreliability of crime figures was acknowledged on all sides, but few believed that statistics alone explained the increase. Were people behaving worse than in the past, or had definitions of what constituted criminal behaviour changed so that more kinds of acts were now being defined as criminal? Conservatives preferred the first kind of explanation; radicals the second.
In fact, of course, the two are not incompatible, and while it was difficult to prove moral deterioration (except through markers such as the rise in violent crime), there was some evidence of a tendency to criminalize new kinds of behaviour, such as homelessness, trespass, peaceful protest and vagrancy. Social policy was hopelessly confused where drugs were concerned—criminalizing possession of cannabis, for example, but not alcohol or tobacco. The radical critique was justified in targeting economic factors, even if they worked less mechanistically than was often suggested. It was true that unemployment played a part in pushing prison rates up, but mostly because it increased re-conviction rates (i.e. it made it harder for prisoners to find work when they were released from prison), and because the unemployed found it difficult to pay fines.
At the same time, the consumer society—with its car radios and mobile phones—generated new temptations and attitudes to crime. So did the welfare state itself: government publicity campaigns targeted benefit fraud—trying to reassure taxpayers that their money was not being squandered—and called on the public to inform on cheats. At the most general level, some argued that the alienation of modern life led people to treat one another with suspicion and to rely on the law to settle disputes which might once have been settled privately. But though this may be true, it remains difficult to see how such a long-term explanation could help explain a relatively recent surge in crime.
In fact, comparison among European countries also shows no clear relationship between crime and incarceration rates. The latter varied enormously, and some countries were far keener to send people to jail than others. European prison populations were proportionately far lower than in the Soviet Union (let alone the USA), and west European rates lower than east European, though rising fast. But in general there was a startling upward trend in prison populations: between 1979 and 1993 the number of prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants rose, for example, in the Netherlands, from 23 to 52, from 44 to 62 in Norway and from 37 to 117 in Spain. The UK had the highest rate in western Europe, and this too rose under the increasingly draconian policies of successive Conservative governments. The Norwegian Nils Christie saw Europe moving “towards GULAGs, Western style” and warned of the dangers of ending up with a crime-control industry on an American scale. Yet some of the symptoms are here already—a buoyant private security industry, the emergence of electronic tagging and other means of surveillance as prisons became overcrowded.25
The new conservative mood of the 1980s could be seen particularly clearly in the Netherlands, traditionally a country reluctant to imprison criminals. This reluctance had been led by a wartime generation of judges whose own experiences during the occupation had given them a deep aversion to incarceration. Now they were passing into retirement just when social engineering and social reformism more generally were being called into question. In March 1994 an official announcement from the Ministry of Justice noted that “punishing is again ‘allowed,’ and the legitimation of penal sanctions is no longer sought in its resocializing effect, but again in incapacitation and retribution as well.” The conservative trend even reached Sweden in the early 1990s, where the centre-right fought the 1991 election with the slogan: “Keep them locked in, so we can go out!”26 And there was also an inescapable racial dimension: the proportion of foreign and ethnic minority prisoners shot up alarmingly in the 1980s. By 1987 they amounted to nearly a third of the prison population in Belgium and France, and above a third in Switzerland. Rates of increase were staggeringly high in countries like Spain and Portugal. Many people were in prison for breaches of immigration law, and in Belgium one third of foreigners detained were in jail “for administrative reasons as a measure of social defence.”27
In some cases this increase reflected the social situation of certain ethnic groups—with higher levels of drug use, or higher rates of unemployment—as well as pervasive racism in the ranks of the police. Although there was much dispute about the reasons, there was no doubt that ethnic minorities were disproportionately afflicted both by unemployment and by imprisonment. In the UK, for instance, the unemployment rate among young black men in London reached a staggering 51 per cent in the early 1990s, and was 37 per cent across all ethnic minorities. It was hard to believe that these statistics did not reflect—among other factors—the persistence of racial prejudice, and a reluctance to admit the members of minorities (as indeed was still the case for women, too) as full citizens in west European society.
