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15 - The Socialist International, 1951–, and the Progressive Alliance, 2013–

from Worldwide Connections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2022

By
Talbot Imlay
Edited by
Marcel van der Linden
Marcel van der Linden
Affiliation:
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
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Summary

In May 2013, delegates from over seventy political parties and other organizations gathered in Leipzig to found the Progressive Alliance as an alternative to the Socialist International (SI) created in 1951. Growing unhappiness with the membership of non-democratic and even authoritarian political parties in the SI provided a powerful spur to the new organization. The year before, Sigmar Gabriel, the chairman of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and a driving force behind the Progressive Alliance, had withheld his party’s membership dues to the SI, insisting that he would not ‘sit at the same table as criminals’.1 Yet far more was at stake in the Progressive Alliance’s creation than disputes over the Socialist International’s membership. The emergence of the Progressive Alliance constituted a direct challenge to the SI’s version of socialist internationalism, one dominated by party elites, rituals of solidarity, and backroom negotiations producing consensus and non-binding resolutions that were aspirational at best and not programmatic.

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Chapter
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The Cambridge History of Socialism , pp. 343 - 365
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Further Reading

de Graaf, Jan, Socialism across the Iron Curtain: Socialist Parties in East and West and the Reconstruction of Europe after 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).Google Scholar
Devin, Guillaume, L’Internationale socialiste. Histoire et sociologie du socialisme international (1945–1990) (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1993).Google Scholar
Imlay, Talbot C., The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Salm, Christian, Transnational Socialist Networks in the 1970s: European Community Development Aid and Southern Development (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).Google Scholar
Sassoon, Donald, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The Western European Left in the Twentieth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Kemseke, Peter, Towards an Era of Development: The Globalization of Socialism and Christian Democracy, 1945–1965 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006).Google Scholar

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