Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (75 page)

But, as it emerged many years later, Scandinavian authorities at least had not abandoned an interest in the theory—and practice—of ‘racial hygiene’. Between 1934 and 1976 sterilization programmes were pursued in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, in each case under the auspices and with the knowledge of Social Democratic governments. In these years some 6,000 Danes, 40,000 Norwegians and 60,000 Swedes (90 percent of them women) were sterilized for ‘hygienic’ purposes: ‘to improve the population’. The intellectual driving force behind these programmes—the Institute of Racial Biology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden—had been set up in 1921, at the peak of the fashion for the subject. It was not dismantled until fifty-five years later.

What, if anything, this sad story tells us about Social Democracy is unclear—distinctly
un
socialist and
un
democratic societies and governments have done more and worse. The legitimacy of the state in post-war Scandinavia, the authority and initiative accorded it by a mostly unquestioning citizenry, left government free to act in what it took to be the common interest with remarkably little oversight. It does not seem ever to have occurred to an
ombudsman
to investigate abuse of those who stood outside the rights-bearing community of tax-paying citizens. The line separating progressive taxation and paternity-leave from forcible interference in the reproductive capacities of ‘defective’ citizens seems not to have been altogether clear to some post-war governments in Social Democratic Scandinavia. If nothing else this suggests that the moral lessons of World War Two were not as clear as was once supposed—precisely (and not perhaps coincidentally) in countries like Sweden whose collective conscience was widely presumed clear.

Outside of Scandinavia, the closest approximation to the Social Democratic ideal was achieved in another small, neutral country on the edge of Western Europe: Austria. Indeed, the superficial similarities were such that observers took to referring to the ‘Austro-Scandinavian model’. In Austria as in Sweden or Norway, an overwhelmingly rural, historically poor country had been transformed, as we have seen, into a prosperous, stable, politically tranquil oasis of state-furnished well-being. In Austria, too, a
de facto
pact had been agreed, in this case between the Socialists and the conservative People’s Party, to avoid any return to the open conflicts of the inter-war decades. But there the similarities ended.

Austria was indeed ‘social’ (and had, after Finland, the largest nationalized sector of any Western European democracy), but it was not particularly Social Democratic. It was only in 1970 that the country got its first post-war Socialist head of government, when Bruno Kreisky became Chancellor. Although Austria over time instituted many of the social services and public policies associated with Scandinavian Social Democratic society—child care, generous unemployment insurance and public pensions, family support, universal medical and educational provision, exemplary state-subsidized transportation—what distinguished Austria from Sweden, for example, was the near-universal allocation of employment, influence, favours and funds according to
political
affiliation. This appropriation of the Austrian state and its resources to stabilize the market in political preferences had less to do with social ideals than with the memory of past traumas. In the wake of their inter-war experience, Austria’s socialists were more interested in stabilizing their country’s fragile democracy than in revolutionizing its social policies.
¹⁴²

Like the rest of Austrian society, the country’s Social Democrats proved remarkably adept at putting their past behind them. Social Democratic parties elsewheretook somewhat longer to abandon a certain nostalgia for radical transformation. In West Germany the SPD waited until 1959 and its Congress at Bad Godesberg to recast its goals and purposes. The new Party Program adopted there baldly stated that ‘Democratic socialism, which in Europe is rooted in Christian ethics, in humanism, and in classical philosophy, has no intention of proclaiming absolute truths.’ The state, it was asserted, should ‘restrict itself mainly to indirect methods of influencing the economy’. The free market in goods and employment was vital: ‘The totalitarian directed economy destroys freedom’.
¹⁴³

This belated acknowledgement of the obvious contrasts with the decision of Belgium’s Labour Party (the
Parti Ouvrier Belge
) the following year to re-confirm the Party’s founding charter of 1894, with its demand for the collectivisation of the means of production; and the refusal of Britain’s Labour Party, also in 1960, to follow the recommendation of its reformist leader Hugh Gaitskell and delete the identical commitment as enshrined in Clause IV of the Party’s 1918 programme. Part of the explanation for this contrast in behaviour lay in recent experience: the memory of destructive struggles and the close proximity of the totalitarian threat, whether in the immediate past or just across a border, helped focus the attention of German and Austrian Social Democrats—like Italian Communists—on the virtues of compromise.

Britain’s Labour Party had no such nightmares to exorcise. It was also, like its Belgian (and Dutch) counterparts in this respect, from its origins a
labour
movement rather than a
socialist
party, motivated above all by the concerns (and cash) of its trade union affiliates. It was thus less ideological—but more blinkered. If asked, Labour Party spokesmen would readily accede to the general objectives of continental European Social Democrats; but their own interests were much more practical and parochial. Precisely
because
of the built-in stability of British (or at least English) political culture, and thanks to its long-established—albeit shrinking—working-class base, the Labour Party showed little interest in the innovative settlements that had shaped the Scandinavian and German-speaking welfare states.

Instead, the British compromise was characterized by demand-manipulating fiscal policy and costly universal social provisions, supported by sharply progressive taxation and a large nationalized sector, and set against a background of unstable and historically adversarial industrial relations. Except for the Labourite emphasis on the intrinsic virtues of nationalization, these ad hoc arrangements were largely supported by the mainstream of the Conservative and Liberal Parties. If there was any sense in which British politics, too, were shaped by past shocks it came in the widespread, cross-party acknowledgement that a return to mass unemployment must be avoided at almost any cost.

Even after the new Labour leader Harold Wilson took his party back into power in 1964 after thirteen years of opposition, and spoke enthusiastically of the ‘white hot technological revolution’ of the age, very little changed. Wilson’s narrow margin of victory in the election of 1964 (a parliamentary majority of four) hardly disposed him to take political risks, and even though Labour did better in elections called two years later there was to be no radical departure in economic or social policy. Wilson himself was heir to the Attlee-Beveridge tradition of Fabian theory and Keynesian practice and showed little interest in economic (or political) innovation. Like most British politicians of every stripe he was deeply conventional and pragmatic, with a proudly myopic view of public affairs: as he once put it, ‘a week is a long time in politics.’

Nevertheless, there
was
a certain distinctiveness about the British Social Democratic state, beyond the insular refusal of all parties concerned to describe it thus. What the British Left (and, at the time, much of the Centre and Centre-Right of the political spectrum) were taken up with above all was the goal of
fairness
. It was the manifest injustice, the unfairness of life before the war that drove both the Beveridge reforms and the overwhelming vote for Labour in 1945. It was their promise that they could liberalize the economy while maintaining a
fair
distribution of rewards and services that brought the Conservatives to power in 1951 and kept them there for so long. The British accepted progressive taxation and welcomed universal health provision not because these were presented as ‘socialist’, but because they were more intuitively just.

In the same way, the curiously regressive workings of the British flat-rate systems of benefits and services—which disproportionately favoured the better-heeled professional middle class—were broadly acceptable because they were egalitarian, if only in appearance. And the most important innovation of the Labour governments of the nineteen sixties—the introduction of un-streamed comprehensive secondary education and the abolition of entrance examinations to selective grammar schools, a longstanding Labour commitment judiciously ignored by Attlee after 1945—was welcomed less on its intrinsic merits than because it was deemed ‘anti-elitist’ and thus ‘fair’. That is why the educational reform was even pursued by Conservative governments after Wilson’s departure in 1970, despite warnings from all sides of the perverse consequences such changes might have.
¹⁴⁴

The Labour Party’s dependence on trade union backing led it to postpone the sorts of industrial reforms that many (including some of its own leaders) knew to be long overdue. British industrial relations remained mired in adversarial shop-floor confrontations and craft-based piece-rate and wage disputes of a kind virtually unknown in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria or the Netherlands. Labour ministers made half-hearted attempts to break clear of this encumbering inheritance, but without much success; and partly for this reason the achievements of continental social democracy were never quite emulated in Britain.

Moreover, the universal features of Britain’s system of welfare, introduced two or even three decades before those of France, or Italy, for example, hid from view the very limited practical achievements of the British state even in the field of material equality: as late as 1967, 10 percent of the UK population still possessed 80 percent of all personal wealth. The net effect of the re-distributive policies of the first three post-war decades was to shift income and assets from the top 10 percent to the next 40 percent; the bottom 50 percent gained very little, for all the general improvement in security and welfare.

Any overall audit of the era of the welfare state in Western Europe will inevitably be side-shadowed by our knowledge of the problems it would face in later decades. Thus today it is easy to see that initiatives like the West German Social Security Reform Act of 1957, which guaranteed workers a pension keyed to their wage at the point of retirement and linked to a cost-of-living index, would prove an intolerable budgetary burden in changed demographic and economic circumstances. And with hindsight it is clear that radical income-levelling in Social Democratic Sweden reduced private savings and thus inhibited future investment. Even at the time it was obvious that government transfers and flat-rate social payments benefited those who knew how to take full advantage of them: notably the educated middle class, who would fight to hold on to what amounted to a new set of privileges.

But the achievements of Europe’s ‘nanny states’ were real all the same, whether introduced by Social Democrats, paternalist Catholics, or prudentially disposed conservatives and liberals. Beginning with core programmes of social and economic protection, the welfare states moved on to systems of entitlement, benefits, social justice and income redistribution—and managed this substantial transformation at almost no political cost. Even the creation of a self-interested class of welfare bureaucrats and white-collar beneficiaries was not without its virtues: like the farmers, the much-maligned ‘lower middle class’ now had a vested interest in the institutions and values of the democratic state. This was good for Social Democrats and Christian Democrats alike, as such parties duly noted. But it was also bad for Fascists and Communists, which mattered rather more.

These changes reflected the demographic transformations already noted, but also unprecedented levels of personal security and a new intensity of educational and social mobility. As west Europeans were now less likely to remain in the place, the occupation, the income bracket and the social class into which they had been born, so they were less disposed to identify automatically with the political movements and social affiliations of their parents’ world. The generation of the 1930s was content to find economic security and turn its back on political mobilization and its attendant risks; their children, the much larger generation of the 1960s, had only ever known peace, political stability and the welfare state. They took these things for granted.

The rise in the influence of the state upon the employment and welfare of its citizens was accompanied by a steady reduction in its authority over their morals and opinions. At the time this was not seen as a paradox. Liberal and Social Democratic advocates for the European welfare state saw no reason in principle why government should not pay close attention to the economic or medical welfare of the population, guaranteeing citizens’ well-being from cradle to grave, while keeping its nose firmly out of their views and practices on strictly personal matters like religion and sex, or artistic taste and judgement. The Christian Democrats of Germany or Italy, for whom the state still had a legitimate interest in the manners and
mores
of its subjects, could not so readily make this distinction. But they too faced growing pressure to adapt.

Until the early 1960s, public authorities throughout Western Europe (with the partial exception of Scandinavia) had exercised firm and mostly repressive control over the private affairs and opinions of the citizenry. Homosexual intercourse was illegal almost everywhere, and punishable by long prison terms. In many countries it could not even be depicted in art. Abortion was illegal in most countries. Even contraception was technically against the law in some Catholic states, albeit often condoned in practice. Divorce was everywhere difficult, in some places impossible. In many parts of Western Europe (Scandinavia once again being a partial exception) government agencies still enforced censorship of theatre, cinema and literature, and radio and television were public monopolies almost everywhere, operating as we have seen under strict rules as to content and with very little tolerance for dissent or ‘disrespect’. Even in the UK, where commercial television was introduced in 1955, it too was strictly regulated and carried a publicly mandated obligation to provide ‘enlightenment and information’ as well as entertainment and advertisements.