Two recent developments stimulate me to rethink the role of the political party in the context of Europe in the twenty-first century. The first is the narrowing of democracy, in contrast to the far-reaching horizons of those who originally fought for it. This narrowing has been a continuing process of containment of democratic pressures since the moments when popular movements eventually won the universal right to vote in different countries at different times. These movements for democracy (in the first instance, the universal franchise) had two features in common: one was an umbilical link between social and economic demands and political power (‘social happiness is our goal, political power is the means’ [Thompson 1984], as the Chartists put it), and the second was a belief that the franchise was just the beginning of a process of achieving popular self-government, not an end in itself.

The second development is the conservatism and defeat of the nationally organised labour movements of the post-war settlement in Europe which could have been sources of counter-power to the economic and state pressures that were narrowing democracy. This does not mean that organisations of labour cannot be built anew. Indeed, the question of what such a rebuilding involves and what the conditions for its possibility are, will be a theme later in the chapter. Such recreation (because it certainly will not be rebuilding of the old) of organisations of labour is, I will contend, a key aspect of new forms of political organisation. But this will require a radical break from the organisational forms of the past.

THE LASTING POLITICAL LEGACY OF THE REVOLTS OF THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES

Exhaustion of the social democratic and communist traditions

Neither the marginalisation of trade unions nor the related narrowing of democracy proceeded without resistance. Indeed, the neoliberal counter-revolution was itself a response to movements to extend the principles of democracy and self-government to every level of society in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These movements were created by a generation whose expectations had been heightened by taking for granted the welfare state and its capacities, which were enhanced by the massive expansion of higher education.