The Social Question Redivivus

Tony Judt

From Foreign Affairs, September/ October 1997

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Summary:  The disappearance of work and widespread dislocation in Europe and the United States pose once again the nineteenth-century "Social Question": how to secure economic progress in light of the political and moral threat posed by the condition of the working class? The solution then was state action, which, contrary to today's neoliberal orthodoxy, fostered economic growth. The state cannot be abandoned now; Europeans won't go for it. It is the only protection from global market forces and the only forum for politics. But the left must stop protecting the status quo and give up unaffordable policies if it is to bring in the excluded and avert extremism.

Tony Judt is Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University and author of A Grand Illusion: An Essay on Europe.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

by Oliver Goldsmith

The little town of Longwy has a ghostly air. For many years it was an important center of iron and steel manufacturing in the industrial basin of the northern Lorraine and a proud stronghold of socialist and communist unions. Since 1975, however, the local industry, like steelworking everywhere in Western Europe, has been in trouble. Today the steelworks are gone, and so, at first sight, are their workers. At noon on a working day the town is quiet, with empty shops, a few sad-looking bars, and a deserted railway station occupied by a gaggle of drunks. The erstwhile steelworkers, grown old, wait out their lives in bars and cafes, or else stay at home with the television. Their wives and daughters have part-time, nonunion work either in new factories and offices distributed in the fields outside the town or else at commercial centers deposited optimistically at crossroads some 20 miles away. Their sons have no work at all and mill around at these same commercial centers looking at once menacing and pitiful.

There are towns like Longwy all over Europe, from Lancashire to Silesia, from the Asturian mountains to the central Slovakian plain. What makes the shattered industrial heartland of northeastern France distinctive is the political revolution that has occurred there. In the legislative elections of 1978, when the left was defeated nationwide, the voters of Longwy returned a communist deputy to Paris, as usual. Twenty years later, in the legislative elections of May 1997, the right-wing National Front -- which did not exist in 1978 -- came within 3,000 votes of overtaking the local communist candidate. A little farther east, in the similarly depressed industrial towns and villages around Sarrebourg that abut the German frontier, the National Front did even better: moving ahead of both communists and socialists, its candidates secured more than 22 percent of the vote in half the local constituencies.

The neo-fascist right, whose program constitutes one long scream of resentment -- at immigrants, at unemployment, at crime and insecurity, at "Europe," and in general at "them" who have brought it all about -- did better still in the decayed industrial valley of the upper Loire west of Lyons, where one in five voters favored it, and best of all in the towns of Mediterranean France. In the greater Marseilles region nearly one voter in four chose the candidates of the National Front. If France had a system of proportional representation, the front would have not 1 but 77 deputies in the new French parliament (double its number under a short-lived system of proportional representation introduced for the 1986 elections), and the left would not have a parliamentary majority.

All these regions, and many others where the far right is now the leading local party, were until very recently strongholds of the left. The demographics of most such places have not altered significantly -- former communists, ...

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