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Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 110 (1995)

Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 110

(1995)– [tijdschrift] Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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The Paradoxes of Success. Dutch Social Democracy and its Historiography
Dietrich Orlow

Anniversaries of successful political parties, particularly if the birthdays are ‘round’ ones like centenaries, tend to call forth a barrage of self-congratulatory literature from political leaders, supplemented by scholarly analyses with varying degrees of sophistication explaining the reasons for the group's success. Remarkably, this scenario has not manifested itself in the case of the recent centennial celebrations of European Social Democracy, including that of the Dutch variant, the ‘Partij van de Arbeid’ (PvdA). Rather, the political leaders have written pieces full of self-doubt, while historians contributed what were sometimes bitter indictments of present-day European Social Democracy and its leaders1.

This is all the more surprising since, as Sir Ralf Dahrendorf and Klaus von Dohnanyi have recently reminded us2, European Social Democracy was an unabashed success story; the Social Democratic parties have dominated much of the political and social agenda in Europe during the twentieth century. The reasons for the unease, as Piet de Rooy has noted, for the PvdA3, lies in the ambivalence of the success story. Both the Socialists themselves and the scholarly community see the Social Democratic accomplishments tarnished by a nagging sense that the price for Social Democracy's political success was the loss of Socialism's ideological soul.

Paradoxically, this now very pervasive self-doubt is of rather recent origin. Until the last decade or so, most analysts (not to mention Social Democratic political leaders) celebrated the increasing conjunction of the Social Democrats political and social agenda and their electoral success with unabashed enthusiasm. Kurt Klotzbach entitled his history of the ‘Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands’ (SPD) after 1945 Der Weg zur Staatspartei4, and that proud boast would certainly hold even more true for the PvdA.

In fact, if there is Leitmotiv to most of the literature on the ‘Sociaal-democratische Arbeiders Partij’ (SDAP) and the PvdA, it is a certain historicist tendency to read into the history of Dutch Democratic Socialism a straight-forward evolution toward full-scale acceptance of the pragmatic reformism that was to characterize all of West European Social Democracy after World War II5. Indeed, and not without some reason, the Dutch party is usually assigned a pioneering role in this story.

The literature on Dutch Social Democracy is, of course, vast and multi-faceted. A comprehensive review is clearly impossible in this short contribution6. Rather, I will restrict myself to some critical comments on relatively few works. These are grouped into what I believe continue to be the main areas of historiographic debate, ideology; voting patterns (the quest for the ‘doorbraak’); and the party's coalition politics and legislative agenda (post-World War II Reformist Policies).

Before embarking on a more specific historiographic review of the history of Dutch Social Democracy, one, perhaps somewhat surprising, characteristic of the literature might be noted. The history of Socialism in The Netherlands has long attracted the attention of scholars outside of Holland, notably those in Germany (here Horst Lademacher at the University of Münster has played a pivotal role) and the Anglo-Saxon countries. The primary reason for this interest is the vanguard role which the SDAP and the PvdA played in what was to become the general evolutionary pattern of European Socialism. The remarkable language facilities of many Dutch scholars have also helped to generate interest in Dutch political history. A number of Dutch historians and political scientists, writing mostly in English or German, have enabled audiences unable to read Dutch to understand the intricacies of politics in The Netherlands7.

Ideology. The Road from Revolution to Evolution

At its founding in 18948 the SDAP did not seem destined for playing a unique role in the evolution of European Social Democracy. Borrowing the ideology and organizational patterns of the German SPD, the SDAP seemed destined, like its mentor, to find its political niche as the spokesman for the interests of the nascent industrial proletariat. However, most works on the early SDAP stress quite correctly that the party very rapidly developed a tendency toward pragmatism and the renunciation of violent revolutionary ambitions. A recent article9 noted, for example, that even the party's founding program made no mention of the ultimate fall and crisis of capitalism. From the beginning, then, the SDAP's German model was the ideas of Eduard Bernstein rather than Karl Kautsky or Rosa Luxemburg. (Incidentally, this was equally true for the SPD, but as Susanne Miller has pointed out10, unlike their Dutch comrades, the

German party leaders refused to embrace ‘Bernsteinianism’ openly, and attempted to straddle the ideological fence between revolution and reformism.

The literature suggests at least two important reasons for this ideological development in Dutch Socialism. One was the succession of remarkably level-headed party leaders and ideologues. Two recent biographies of Wiardi Beckman and Henri Polak11 demonstrate yet again the passionate commitment to political democracy of the early SDAP and labor union leaders. In this context it is not surprising that when the party's leader issued a half-hearted call for revolution in 1918, this was taken more seriously by the later Dutch fascists than by the SDAP's activists. A second factor was fortuitous rather than a virtue on the side of the SDAP. The Dutch Socialists had the good fortune of not confronting a serious Communist rival in The Netherlands12. Unlike especially their French comrades13, the Dutch Socialists did not have to constantly look over their left shoulders.

A number of scholarly analyses have been devoted to the SDAP's history in the 1930s. The literature reveals a remarkable consensus that the party's analysis of the Depression constituted a major turning point or at least acceleration of the SDAP's evolution toward reformism. With few exceptions14 historians praise the SDAP's 1937 program as a clear break with the last vestiges of Marxist structural determinism, definitively setting the party on its path toward becoming a volkspartij15.

A second focal point of attention for the 1930s is the SDAP's role in developing the 1935 Plan van de Arbeid16 as the party's (and the Socialist labor unions') answer to the Depression. With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that the Plan (and even more the campaign to popularize it!) was an emotional high point for many of the SDAP's activists at the time17.

The scholarly contributions tend to be rather historicist in tone, stressing the forwardlooking aspects of the Plan. A variety of authors emphasize that the Plan's neocorporatist elements reappeared in Dutch post-World War II economic thinking and

policies, that the Plan facilitated the later cooperation between Socialists and left-wing Catholics in the rooms-rode coalitions, and that the proposal was instrumental in bringing the early post-war leaders of the PvdA, men like Willem Banning and Koos Vorrink, into the mainstream of Dutch Socialism18. With most scholars emphasizing the 1930's significance as preparing the way for the smooth road to post-war reformism, it is perhaps useful to note at least one collection of essays which is sharply critical of the Dutch Socialists' ideological evolution in the 1930s and beyond19.

World War II was a crucial period in the development of European Socialism. Precisely because the Social Democratic parties were out of power and persecuted by the Nazis and their collaborationist allies, they were forced to reexamine many of their ideological postulates, including the role of nationalism and fascism in modern European history. Emerging from the discussion of the Socialists' failure to understand the true nature and threat of fascism20 were new proposals for the transformation of Democratic Socialism and the Socialist parties in post-war Europe21.

Never was Dutch Socialism's pioneering role more evident than in the years immediately following World War II. In retrospect, the party's self-transformation from class party to volkspartij set the pattern for what was to be the future of Democratic Socialism in Western Europe. The dissolution of the SDAP and its replacement by the new PvdA exemplified the straight-forward and consistent way in which the Dutch Socialists embraced the volkspartij concept.

It is also true that the historiography of these years comes closest to the danger of being characterized by what Peter Steinbach has called Legitimationswissenschaft22. Histories of the NVB and the founding of the PvdA23, as well as biographical and autobiographical studies of the PvdA's early leaders24, suggest forcefully that the transition from SDAP to PvdA was exceptionally smooth and successful. In order not to be overwhelmed by this retrospective picture of political bliss, it is useful to balance these accounts with reminiscences of those, like Sam de Wolff25, who bitterly opposed the de-Marxization of the party, and to recall that at least in the short-run the PvdA's

expectations of leading the way toward a complete restructuring of the Dutch political landscape were disappointed26.

Keeping the focus of attention on the advance of right-wing reformism has also meant that the remaining pockets of left-wing opposition in the PvdA tend to be rather neglected. This is less true for the ‘Pacifistisch Socialistische Partij’ (PSP), which split from the party in 195727, than for the ‘Sociaal Democratisch Centrum’ (SDC), although the latter was for many years a thorn in the side of the PvdA's reformist leaders28.

The era of somewhat self-satisfied pragmatism turned sour as the 1950s drew to a close. Dissatisfaction with the policies of the bourgeois-PvdA coalition, which had governed The Netherlands throughout the ‘long decade of the 1950s’, had been growing for some years. The breakup of the coalition was a milestone of sorts; the Dutch Socialists were to spend more than a decade in the opposition. But the end of the decade brought more than a change of seats from the government to the opposition benches for the party. As in much of Europe and, for that matter, the rest of the world, youthful leftist elements challenged the seemingly undoubted verities of the post-war world.

The rise of Nieuw Links had some unique features. Like their counterparts in other countries, the Dutch leftists professed a vaguely populist, hyper-democratic, but not really Marxist ideology29, but only in The Netherlands did Nieuw Links decide on a Marsch durch die Institutionen, with the PvdA one of the primary, targeted Institutionen. In France the young ‘revolutionaries’ disregarded the sclerotic Section Française de l'Ouvrière Internationale (SFIO) as irrelevant for the political future of the country, and in Germany the specific nature of the grand coalition led the young Erneuerer to concentrate their efforts on the Ausserparlamentarische Opposition. In The Netherlands, however, for much of the decade of the 1960s Nieuw Links elements fought for control of the party with the ‘old guard’, and at least on paper by 1969 they had won.

The literature on the rise and integration of Nieuw Links also exhibits a strain of historicism. While it is perhaps not surprising that the theoretical contributions of

Nieuw Links leaders30 read as though their authors had just invented the wheel, it is rather more questionable that scholarly contributions favorable to Nieuw Links also insisted the history of the PvdA had just begun with the arrival of the newcomers. In these works the history of the PvdA tended to be treated as a sort of historical mistake until the arrival of Nieuw Links put the party on its correct path31. In this atmosphere of heightened emotionalism it is understandable that the critics of Nieuw Links repaid in the same coin. They treated the reformers as the vanguard of the apocalypse, ready to destroy all that was decent in Democratic Socialism32.

In retrospect it has become clear that Nieuw Links contributed more heat than light to the development of Dutch Social Democracy. The literature, too, has become less virulent. More recent publications have not only placed the significance of Nieuw Links into a larger historical and comparative context, but even some of the Nieuw Links activists themselves (many of whom now hold responsible positions in the PvdA) have mellowed over the years33.

The real significance of the 1960s and 1970s was not the arrival of Nieuw Links or the renewed discussion of a fundamental restructuring of the Dutch party system34, but the rise of Joop den Uyl. Here was a towering figure who not only managed to integrate the Nieuw Links elements peacefully, and, on the whole constructively, into the PvdA, but who also succeeded in giving the party a new agenda in the age of Entideologisierung and leading it back into governmental responsibility. A scholarly biography of Den Uyl remains a desideratum, but we are fortunate in having readily accessible a number of the seminal articles which Den Uyl published in these years, notably in the pages of Socialisme en Democratie35.

The scholarly literature, too, has long been fascinated by Den Uyl and the politics of the 1970s36. While most analysts accept the growing Entideologisierung and the loss

of idealism as facts of political life in The Netherlands and elsewhere (in the discussion with Sir Ralf Dahrendorf cited earlier, the Austrian chancellor Kurt Vranitzky noted that people in Europe started to laugh as soon as politicians mentioned visionary idealism37), there are some critical voices as well. These complain that the absorption of Nieuw Links into mainstream politics and the homogenization of ideological positions has meant the loss of Social Democracy's unique vision of future-oriented idealism38.

The quest for the ‘doorbraak’

The PvdA's postulated (and sometimes lamented) ideological Drang zur Mitte was and is, of course, intimately related to the quest for votes in a political democracy. In any discussion of Dutch politics this topic involves the relationship of the Socialists' sought-for doorbraak and the concept of verzuiling which, according to most scholars, dominated the political landscape in The Netherlands until well into the 1960s39.

A number of scholarly contributions have analyzed the PvdA's attempts to achieve a doorbraak among voters and simultaneously break up the rigid contours of the verzuiling system40.

But there is also a good deal of persuasive literature explaining why the dreams of early post-war PvdA leaders for a complete restructuring of the party system in The Netherlands were illusions. Herstel not vernieuwing was the mood of the ‘long decade’ of the 1950s41.

A unique component of the PvdA's efforts to become fully accepted as a volkspartij was its attitude toward Dutch colonialism in general and more specifically the Indonesian independence movement. The party's leaders were convinced that only by following the lead of their Catholic coalition partner could they succeed in establishing the PvdA's position as a true mainstream Dutch political party. This decision was not without its contemporary political price, including a loss of members and some bitter

personal animosities, notably between the prime minister Willem Drees and the party's parliamentary leader in the early years after the war, Van der Goes van Naters42. Some recent analyses are also sharply critical of the PvdA's position as essentially contrary to Socialist ideals of self-determination and human freedom43. Still, the controversies over colonialism in the PvdA were mild tensions compared to the upheavals which literally split the French Socialists. The question of Algerian independence led to vituperations of the Socialist leaders, notably Guy Mollet44, which have no equivalent in Dutch political literature.

Post World War II Reformist Policies

The PvdA was a member of the governing coalition from 1945 to the end of the 1950s. These years saw the creation of the modern social welfare state in The Netherlands, and the PvdA played a major part in its construction. Indeed, both party leaders and scholars regard this time period as the most successful era in the party's history45, although, paradoxically, it is also the least well-studied one.

The assessment of the PvdA's reformist policies in terms of success or failure is intricately tied to the debate over the party's coalition decisions, and that in turn is part of the still on-going debate over the concept of the uiterste noodzaak. The history of Dutch cabinet formations, at least in its structural and institutional parameters, has been well-established46, and on the surface the PvdA became an integral part of the Dutch governing elite after World War II.

However, a series of publications by H. Daudt in the 1970s and 1980s47 have called this facile conclusion into question. Daudt contends the Socialists were accepted into the cabinet only when the bourgeois partners felt the PvdA's constituency needed to be pacified by the illusion of sharing power. In effect, the PvdA became a fig leaf for policies that were often contrary to the interests of its core constituency. Whenever the danger of political instability had passed, the Socialists were unceremoniously kicked out of the cabinet. While provocative, Daudt's theory has not been without its critics.

They contend the bourgeois parties, notably the KVP, did not present nearly as united a front as Daudt claims. Rather, the changes in policy direction and coalition composition were in large part a function of shifts within the Catholic polity48.

An example of such a seismic shift within Dutch political Catholicism was the 1954 Catholic bishops' Mandement, a clear effort by the ecclesiastical hierarchy to discourage the left wing drift of the Catholic constituency. The Mandement is often cited as evidence for Daudt's thesis, and the PvdA's decision to appease rather than openly confront the Catholics' challenge as proof that the PvdA failed to recognize the concept of uiterste noodzaak49. In a sense, the debate over the uiterste noodzaak is a little beside the point, because the PvdA leaders quite deliberately chose to follow a policy of appeasement in regard to the Mandement because they felt remaining in the coalition would bring political benefits to the party. In retrospect, remaining in the coalition for another five years brought a mixed bag of results: Diminishing legislative influence, but increasing success in attracting middle class swing votes to the PvdA.

Remarkably, with the exception of the weak left wing, the leaders' decision on remaining part of the coalition and not challenging directly the Mandement was met with relatively little critical comment from within the party or the scholarly community at the time. The flood of analysis and self-criticism did not come until the breakup of the coalition in 1959. Then a number of party leaders50 contended that the party had stayed in the cabinet far too long. This line was continued by Nieuw Links and its allies, which argued there were very few overeenkomsten between the PvdA and any bourgeois partners, especially the KVP51.

An assessment of the thesis (or perhaps better, accusation) that the PvdA was duped by its coalition partners is not possible without examining the PvdA's policy objectives in the 1950s and 1960s, and equally important, to place these goals in the context of the larger Dutch political landscape in these years. A number of scholars have noted that the post-war era in The Netherlands (and Western Europe in general) was not a time that favored radical socio-economic innovation. In fact, the climate for democratic social revolution was particularly unfavorable in Holland52. In contrast to France, in The Netherlands there was not even the vague de nationalisation53, which provided that country with a verisimilitude of radical change. In this sense, then, the PvdA's expressed desire for a radical maatschappelijke omvorming was effectively blocked by the larger political environment. However, as a number of scholars have noted, the

PvdA's own historical tradition also put brakes on the party's becoming a vehicle for radical change. Keeping in mind the SDAP's plans for solving the problems of the Great Depression, the PvdA's quiet abandonment of Hein Vos' proposals for full-scale planisme and the party's acceptance of neo-corporatism after World War II are not altogether surprising. It is perhaps symptomatic that the one nationalization scheme that was carried out after World War II, the nationalization of the ‘Nederlandsche Bank’, was a demand that had already surfaced in the Plan van de Arbeid54.

Judgments of the PvdA's economic and social policies in the crucial post-war period can be divided along ideological and chronological lines: Scholars more sympathetic to what would become Nieuw Links positions tend to be critical of what they see as the abandonment of fundamental Socialist positions55, while others more favorable to ‘pragmatism’ see in the party's cooperation with its bourgeois partners evidence that the Dutch Socialists had abandoned chasing after unattainable goals and had achieved the status of a mainstream volkspartij56. (Incidentally, neo-corporatism rather than ‘socialization’ was the pattern established in other West European countries as well57. Fortunately, we do not need to rely exclusively on the scholarly battles. A perceptive collection of reminiscences by a number of contemporary party activists provides a useful first-hand account of the controversies58.

After the Sturm und Drang of the 1950s and 1960s the debate over the future of the party became rather muted in the 1970s and 1980s. The tone was set by Joop den Uyl's emphasis on the smalle marge as spelling success or failure in the tightly contested race for voters in the middle of the political spectrum. Like other West European Social Democratic parties, the PvdA became a vote-getting machine to achieve incremental reforms; Den Uyl specifically identified his vision for the PvdA with the Bad Godesberg program of the West German SPD59.

Finally, a few remarks on the PvdA's role in Dutch foreign relations. Aside from its continuous activism in the Socialist International, this is a field in which the party over the years has shown less interest and certainly less influence than in domestic affairs60;

Liberals and Christian Democrats, not Social Democrats, held the foreign relations portfolio in the post-war cabinets.

Interestingly, with the exception of a not very serious running controversy over the recognition of the former German Democratic Republic in the 1960s, there was (and is) little disagreement on the foreign policy issue in the PvdA. The Netherlands' integration into the Western alliance was accepted as virtually axiomatic, and the party's rank-and-file tended to be even more enthusiastic about European integration than some of the leaders. (Willem Drees, for example, was rather more pessimistic about European political unity than, for example, Sicco Mansholt or Marinus van der Goes van Naters61.) Still, the party as a whole accepted with little or no reservation each of the milestones on the road to the European Union from the Schuman Plan and the European Defense Community62 to the Common Market. Some leaders even pushed early on for the creation of a supra-national European progressive party63.

The Future

As a general rule, historians are well advised not to embark on future prognostications, but in the case of the Dutch Socialist party the past history seems to establish such a clear pattern of development, that there is at least a modicum of safety in looking forward. The PvdA and its predecessor played a pioneering role in the self-transformation of European Social Democracy from political groups that represented a single societal constituency to parties that have become genuine left-of-center progressive volkspartijen. This has become the established norm in Western Europe, and is unlikely to change in the future. Moreover, as a pragmatic volkspartij the PvdA has become and continues to be a genuine political success story. It is not insignificant that while the Social Democratic parties in neighboring countries are struggling to attain (or retain) governmental responsibility in the 1990s, the PvdA continues to be a member of the Dutch national coalition. Indeed, a Social Democrat is again the prime minister of The Netherlands.

It is precisely for its pioneering role that the PvdA's history has so long fascinated both Dutch and non-Dutch scholars. In a very real sense the history of Dutch Socialism is far more than the story of a single political party in a small country. Rather, the PvdA's history has achieved typological significance considerably beyond the borders of The Netherlands. True, this development also brought with it a rather historicist emphasis in many of the analyses, but perhaps this is a small price to pay for a particularly rich historiography.

While it is difficult to predict the PvdA's future history, the historian is on somewhat firmer ground in expressing some wishes as to where the future historiography of the party should go. It seems to me that there are three areas that have been rather neglected in recent writings. (Incidentally, these remarks are equally valid for other European Social Democratic parties.)

First of all, analyses of the evolution of ideological developments among Dutch Social Democrats have been rather neglected since the 1950s. After the rush of new ideas from Nieuw Links proved to be neither very new nor much of a set of ideas, all too many historians contented themselves with the notion that the absence of ideology was in fact the Social Democrats' ideology. This is, I think, an unwarranted oversimplification. Post-1970 ideas for the future of Dutch and European society coming from the Social Democrats are clearly not those that were enunciated in the 1930s and 1940s, but they do constitute a specific set of values which differs from those of their political rivals and which do need to be analyzed in more detail.

This needs to be done, I think, in the context of the emerging and by now virtually complete Dutch and West European tertiary industrial society. And this brings me to the second set of desiderata for future historiographic efforts. The traditional Social Democratic ideology was created as an answer to the specific national challenges of a secondary industrial society. Western Europe especially after World War II, however, as a recent book by Hartmut Kaelble has eloquently demonstrated64, has become a tertiary industrial society in which national boundaries are becoming increasingly less important. Histories of the PvdA, especially those covering events since the 1970s, should, I think, take more account of this development. Studies of the PvdA in the past have tended to be rather introspective, an emphasis that was perhaps more justified for the period before 1970 than after that date.

Finally, I think, we need more work on the PvdA's role in foreign relations. There is no doubt that for the most part PvdA political leaders were not the movers and shakers in the foreign policy establishment, but it is equally true that many of the ideas which formed the basis for the present-day European Union eminated from the ranks of the Social Democrats and were only belatedly and often grudgingly accepted by the bourgeois political leaders who structured Dutch foreign policy. Historians, I think, would do well to give more credit to the traditions of internationalism among Dutch and other European Social Democrats than they have in the past.


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