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Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000

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Geoff Eley, one of the leading historians of modern Germany, and a prominent academic radical, has produced a large volume on the history of the European left... Eley...pays greater attention to the pre-1945 situation, and more attention to Eastern and Central Europe. His style is more repetitive, and it flows less easily than his colleague David Blackbourn, his co-author on the seminal "The Peculiarities of German History."

Notwithstanding that, Eley's message is well worthy of repetition and study. On the basic point he is right. The Socialist Movement that grew in the aftermath of the constitutional struggles of the 1860s and 1870s was vital to the growth of European democracy. Here the democratic policies of Marx were crucial in contrast to the flaws of anarchism, which fluctuated between terrorist vanguardism and ineffective apoliticalism. Socialists helped organize the first modern democratic political parties, and they took the lead in supporting universal suffrage for both men and women against elitist liberals and reactionary conservatives. Communists took the lead in opposing colonialism, in contrast to many socialists, let alone many liberals or the self-serving cant of a Woodrow Wilson. This does not mean that Eley is uncritical of his protagonists. Aside from the obvious flaws of Stalinism, the Socialists and Communists fatally underestimated the role of women and encouraged a politics that depoliticized them and discouraged their political activism. This was bad not simply on principled grounds but because women in the 1870s and afterwards played an important part of the industrial and employment world and they could vigorously engage in political activities. Moreover, in doing so, the Left legitimized conservative and commonplace views on sexuality, the birth rate and the family that solidified the views of the Right. The Left's other major weakness is that while it usually, and understandably, avoided putschist talk, it failed to develop an extra-parlimentary strategy to compliment its electoral one. Again and again, in 1918, 1936, 1945, 1968 and onwards, its deliberately narrow strategies limited its options and its strength.

What are the strengths of this book? It is well documented, and the 93 pages of secondary sources are exhaustive on most topics. Eley makes a real effort to cover all of Europe. Some of the setpieces are very good, including a brief account of the Spanish Civil War and the 1968 Paris Spring. The chapter on 1960s and 70s feminism is very useful, and records a number of spectacularly condescending anti-feminist comments (when one Labour party official is told that some women want to set up a feminist study group he wonders why, what's there to learn about Lenin's views on lingerie?). He reminds us that Communists were not the sole obstacle of Left Unity in the thirties and that social democrats had their own sectarian tendencies. Thousands of Communists were interned or dismissed in the last days of the Third Republic, while Petain and Laval were at complete liberty. Occasionally, Eley draws a sharp portrait of his widely assorted cast of characters. On Ernest Bevin: "Incorrigibly authoritarian and anti-intellectual to a fault, Bevin was the archetypal labor bureaucarat, incurably hostile to rank and file activists and socialist thinkers alike, belligerently intolerant of democracy, whether on the shopfloor, in the general meeting, or in the committee room, let alone on the streets." On Francisco Largo Caballero: "Largo was a disaster for the [Spanish] Republic, strutting on the stage of history while its real chances were missed. A Johnny-come-lately of revolution...[he] struck the pose of revolutionary tribune after 1933, urging the masses into confrontations he had no strategy for winning."

Some disagreements. The fate of the Russian Revolution is not systematically concentrated anywhere; its degeneration is more or less diffused throughout the book. The 1936 French Popular Front gets much less space than the 1968 revolt or the Greater London Council. Moreover, Eley is not altogether fair to Leon Blum (devaluation appears as a betrayal, when in fact it should have been done earlier). Nor later to Alexander Dubcek. Oddly enough for such a European work, Russia seems to disappear from the book after 1991. Admittedly the nineties are not covered in much detail, but this seems to unconciously represent Russia's exorcism from Europe. At times Eley criticizes the Left for its condescending attitude towards popular culture and its somewhat unimaginative concentration on the classics. But the radical effloresence of 1917-20 and 1936, while often showing great artistic merit, such as in Eisenstein and Brecht, also had a limited popular attraction. Eley does not make clear how the Left could have competed with Hollywood or television, nor does he fully confront masscult's ultimately meretricious character. Notwithstanding all that, this is important book, which deserves considerable study and reflection.

We are so conditioned to the fix put on the left by the Leninist tradition that we forget the crucial role of the left in the 'forging of democracy' as recounted in this history in a 'slow but steady' account that accumulates telling detail. Once there were liberals who weren't democrats and then the left, in the wake of the failures of 1848, proceeded to the course corrections we now take for granted, no thanks to the liberals who weren't democrats, now democrats, by name at least, denouncing socialism by a Leninist standard where the term was a demand for real democracy.

Eley is one of the more prominent radical leftists at a radical left university so you should not expect much balance in his writing. But I did try to get through this book with an open mind and must say that about half of the book has some interesting historical events in it. The problem is that most of these events are shaded and slanted in such a way as to make this book useless to anyone who has studied history and historical movements. Eley is a classic radical who really has no appreciation for competing thoughts or ideas other than his leftist view of the world. The fact that the Soviet Union kind of falls off a cliff in the book when its obvious failures killed this evil philosophy and economic system is most telling. But he will continue to write this kind of drivel, pounding nonsense into the kids in his classrooms, and make a lot of money from hard working taxpayers for doing so.