National Roads to Socialism
The Concept of 'Nation' on the Danish and Swedish Left 1956-66
1. Introduction
The nation and the political left have had a precarious relationship in the 20th century. Socialists have often been torn between an internationalist heritage, their individual national political cultures and loyalties and – when in power – their obligations as members of national governments. In the interwar period, socialist and social democratic parties adapted to the national political scenes by entering governments in individual countries and leaving a working-class-based ideology to embrace ‘the people’ instead. The communist parties on the other hand was ideologically and strategically bound to the Soviet Union through the Comintern – an institution coordinating the activities of communist parties in the name of ‘international solidarity’, de facto a means of the Soviet Union to control foreign communist parties. The dilemma of the extreme left through the 1920s and 1930s was to gain confidence on the national scene, while obeying orders from Moscow at the same time.
In 1943 the Comintern was dissolved as a gesture to the Allies by the Soviet Union. One could obviously not have an institution committed to the overthrow of the political and economic systems of ones allies. Considering the situation of most communist parties during the war and the huge prestige of the Soviet Union after the allied victory, this did not mean that Moscow loosened its grip on international communism. Indeed, in 1947 the Comintern was revived in an officially less centralized from, the Communist Information Bureau, Cominform. The communist parties thus still could not rid themselves of the image of being ‘Soviet spies’. After a European-wide success in the post-war elections, the communist take-over in Czechoslovakia in 1948 enforced this image, and communist went back to their pre-war existence on the margin of political life in Western Europe.[1]
This precarious relationship between the extreme political left and the nation is the point of departure of my project: the incoherence between being a party on a national scene and at the same time having a both ideological and historical internationalist heritage. With decolonisation, the split between the Soviet Union and China and the rise of the new left, the picture gets even more complicated. My working hypothesis is that the relationship between internationalism and national agendas of the left stays precarious and incoherent during the whole of the 20th century. I want to find out how and why the concept of nation changes, how it is used and what part it plays in the political culture on the left, in order to give a picture of the left wing that shows the relationship between coherencies and incoherencies, anachronism and dynamic, ideology and power.
I find this relevant for (at least) two different reasons, which I will mention briefly here and explain in more detail below: First, the history of the left, and particularly the history of the new left, has to a large extend been written as a history of ideas were parties or movements are linked directly to ideologies, which in an orderly and coherent way structures both internal and external politics. My ambition is to take a concept like the nation, which from the beginning has a precarious ideological position on the left, and focus on the incoherencies of its use. I hope to be able to present an alternative to the history of the left and of left-wing intellectuals, where the agents do not interpret the world and act according to coherent and reducible systems or ideological structures. I want to look at the changes of the use and content of the concept to discover how political and ideological power was distributed on the left, and how ideology and language was dependent on changes in the distribution of power.
Secondly and more specific to the Scandinavian case, I want to find out why the national agenda in the last half of the 20th century was taken over by the left wing, effectively – and often with from a right-out nationalist position - being against any kind of binding integration into the international community. Latest shown by the successful campaigns against membership of the Euro in both Denmark and Sweden.
This paper will try to give an outline of where I stand at the moment. For my June-paper I intend to write about the period 1956-66, a time of split and reform in the Danish and Swedish communist parties. It is divided into three parts: the first one (section 2-3) is a theoretical discussion about the concepts 'left' and 'nation', the second one (section 4-5) is a more general introduction to the international and national history of the left in the period, and the third and largest one is a concrete example of the use of the concept of nation. It deals only with the nation seen in the global context. In the June paper I should like to work my way down from the global, to the European, to the Nordic and finally to the domestic level.
2. What do I mean by 'Left'?
There exists a quite extensive literature on the topic of the division between left and right in politics. Some authors want to keep the division, as they see it as an essential, bipolar structure of politics, others see it as a historically constructed and constantly changing concept. Tempting as it might be to enter this theoretical discussion, I choose to see it from the point of view of the pragmatic historian, looking for a concept that opens up for new questions and new knowledge. Still some kind of definition is needed.
One possibility is to look at the ideological definitions of ‘left’: what is at the core of leftist ideology? One of the most well written attempts to answer this is Norberto Bobbios book Left and Right. The Significance of a Political Distinction.[2] After an interesting discussion of left and right as a spatial metaphor with many positions between the two poles, Bobbio arrives to the rather essentialist conclusion that ‘left’ can be reduced to a leading principle of equality, the leftist position will always be the more egalitarian one.[3] A similar attempt to reduce the concept of ‘left’ to an ideological core has been made by Steven Lukes in the article “Qu’est-ce que la gauche?”[4] Less convincingly and considerably more vaguely than Bobbio, he ends up with a definition of ‘left’ as a principle of ‘rectification’ (correcting wrongs), a never-ending fight against exploitation and oppression.[5] Both authors are politically on the left wing themselves, which to a large degree influence their conclusions. Unfortunately – and partly for this reason - none of them would be very useful as a tool to separate left from right. Most obviously, Lukes’ definition is not much good, who would not try to correct wrongs and fight oppression? And who is to decide, what for example oppression is? Does Margaret Thatcher’s fight against the oppression of the individual against the welfare state make her a champion of the left? Definitions such as this one clearly comes from a rhetoric figure on the left, which defines itself in ethical terms, where ‘left’ is good and ‘right’ is evil.[6] Norberto Bobbio is far more convincing, egalitarianism is a large element in left wing ideology. But on the other hand, you can’t help posing your self the question: can the whole political culture, red banners with hammer and sickle and singing the ‘Internationale’ be reduced to an idea of egalitarianism? The argument of the book itself is for example often built up dialectically, a clear inheritance from Bobbios Marxist origins. But what is the link between egalitarianism and dialectics? And if you think further, how does it fit with the elitist elements in Lenin’s idea about the party leading the masses? The answer must be that reducing ‘left’ to some core idea is not going to get you very far.
Another way to look at left and right as a political division, is to go back to its historical roots in the French revolution, where ‘left’ was associated with change and ‘right’ with conservatism in the original meaning of the word. The Canadian Jean A. Laponce in his book Left and Right. The Topography of Political Perceptions argues that this practical division reflecting the agenda of the French revolution has developed into a myth "of a cosmic conflict between two abstract forces - one called left, the other called right".[7] The original purpose of the division has vanished, so that the two concepts have freed themselves from any reference to particular ideological points of view.
The historical point of departure leads to the conclusion that the concept ‘left’ is a construction continuously being reconstructed.[8] It seems that instead of looking for a clear and stable definition of ‘the left’, one should take a look the people that define and redefine what it means to be on the left. Before reaching his essentialist conclusion, Bobbio writes extensively about left and right as spatial metaphors indicating proximity and distance. It is a key to find possible allies in the political game, a space in which to place your self in relation to others – friends, allies or enemies.[9]
A definition stressing space and relativity leads to another theory, namely that of Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of 'social space' or field, as an:
"ensemble des positions distinctes et coexistantes, extérieures les unes aux autres, définies les unes par rapport aux autres, par leur extériorité mutuelle et par des relations de proximité …"[10]
This way of looking as the left as a space structured by related positions seems to me the most open and comprehensive point of departure. Instead of struggling with more or less abstract ethical or philosophical measures it suggests a much more pragmatic approach: to look at the network of people recognising themselves and others to be ‘on the left’. They take different positions, some more powerful than others, but always defined by relation to other positions in the same space. It also allows you to use the theoretical apparatus of Bourdieu to pose questions about the distribution of power and resources (capital) in the field, and how this capital is used in the struggle for more power and resources.
This choice of a dynamic, constructivist approach over a stable and essential one also allows you to criticize much of the writing on the history of the left wing. Since the left in Europe for the last 50 years has been dominated by intellectuals and vice versa, much of its history has been a history of ideas: Maoism vs. Trotskyism vs. Leninism etc. Many authors have built their analysis on an ideological core, from which everything else could be derived. One influential theory has been Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamisons so called ‘cognitive approach’ to social movements. It divides social movements into a ‘cosmological’, ‘technological’ and ‘organisational’ dimensions. Where practises and organisation of a social movement derives from certain basic ideological assumptions.[11] The result of this way of looking at the left – Eyerman and Jamison have dealt especially the new left – is that you take the ideological statements of parties and movements at their face value. They end up with a picture of free idealistic agents trying to save the world from the evil technocrats.[12] Since the connection between ideology and practise is assumed from the beginning no room is left open for criticism, everything seems stable and coherent.
My ambition is to show the opposite: the left was just as opportunistic, incoherent and full of intrigues as any other part of political life. The agents were not – as they liked to picture themselves - free-floating rebels outside the ‘system’, but were restricted by particular patterns of thinking, by the distribution of resources and the ongoing struggle for domination in the field.[13]
3. The concept of nation
The main focus in the thesis lies on the concept of nation. Here I face another problem of definition. On one hand, a firm definition would lead to a tautology: I would already have defined what I am looking for, and therefore only be finding material fitting my definition. On the other hand, I need some kind of definition that helps me pick out the relevant sources. Apart from that, 'nation' is an almost impossible to define objectively.[14]
One solution that avoids the problem of definition is the method of conceptual history, as Reinhart Koselleck puts it himself with a quotation from Nietzsche: “definierbar ist nur das, was keine Geschichte hat”,[15] that is to say, it is not about defining what you are looking for, but rather to see how the definition of that which you look at changes. In practical terms this means looking for the word itself, and then see how the ones who use it define it. Another historian of concepts, Rolf Reichart, has proposed the idea of constructing a ‘conceptual field’ around the concept you are analysing. This is quite simply a framework in which to place different words in relation to the concept: which words are used to define what the concept is and what it is not, describe what its properties, and how these properties have manifested themselves historically.[16] For example: “Denmark is a democratic country which is peaceful by nature, but ready to fight when threatened by its arch-enemy, the German militarism. As the resistance movement has shown during the war”. This constructed quotation could have been taken from a Danish left-wing article, it shows what and how Denmark is, what it is not, and it gives a historical example to prove that this picture is true.
I also find it useful to use theoretical tools that fit together. You can mirror the political field of Bourdieu with Reicharts conceptual field, so that positions in one field resemble positions in the other. For instance the position of the ‘other’ in the conceptual field - Germany in the example above - with a position in the political field – communists – the communists are loyal patriots, because they fight German superiority in NATO and in the EEC, as they fought Germany during the war. By tying the two positions together, the communists can gain a cultural capital, which again can be conversed into other forms of capital.
Last, the attraction of the field-metaphor also lies in its ‘flat’ character. I intend two use it as an alternative to the word ‘discourse’, which as a spatial metaphor has two levels: one at the surface, where you find the concrete phenomenon and one underlying structure, which generates the surface according to some rules or guiding principles. This is related to the remarks above about essentialism and use of coherent, ideological core principles. My aim is to describe the dynamic incoherence on the left, not to find a hidden meaning ‘beneath the surface’.[17]
Of course, the conceptual field is not a perfect tool; it offers no clear-cut answer to, what belongs to it and what not. I still have problems deciding which discussions relates to the nation as such, especially when it comes to domestic politics, which all has some relation to the nation-state. For the time being, I have more or less arbitrarily limited myself to discussions about foreign politics (attitudes towards the ‘other’), culture, the people (especially in the relation to the concept of class), and to a lesser extend the welfare state, because the nation seems to play an interesting role here. I am still in doubt about the country as a physical object and about local politics.
4. From Soviet hegemony to pluralism
The 1950s have often been seen as the beginning of the end of communism. The dispute between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia revealed the first "crack in the base of the Stalinist 'monolith' ",[18] which was followed by an increasing loss of control culminating in the revolutions of 1989-90. Even though the 2nd world war and its aftermath had spread communism to Eastern and Central Europe and to China, Kremlin did no longer have the power to control all new regimes, nor could it keep tight control over western communists, as it did it the 1930s. As described above, this process had begun already with the dissolution of Comintern in 1943. Only at that point in time, very few communist parties could react on the change, as they were mostly either busy fighting the Germans in the national resistance movements or in German concentration camps. The founding of Cominform in 1947 did only bring back some of Moscow's former power over its western allies, it was mainly directed at the new communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc, with the PCI and the PCF as its only western members.[19] During the 1950s and 1960s it would become clear that control Eastern Europe depended on accessibility of Soviet tanks. The Soviet Union could crush rebellions in East Germany and Hungary, but not prevent Yugoslavia, and later China and Albania, to free itself from the Soviet grip.
By the mid-50s the CPSU still was the undisputed head of international communism. At its 20th congress in February 1956 delegates from all over the world travelled to Moscow to make the traditional congratulations to the victories of socialism and to hear the latest guidelines from the 'most experienced and successful communist party in the world'. The new Soviet leader emerging from the power struggles after Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev, would send them home bewildered and confused. Officially, he launched two new strategies that would have deep impact on western communism: National roads to socialism and peaceful coexistence. The national roads to socialism meant that other communist parties should not necessarily take the Soviet Union as the only example, how to build a socialist society. They should be aware of the specific national conditions under which they were working and form their own strategy according to this. Violent revolution needed for instance not be the only way to change a capitalist system. Peaceful coexistence meant that the Soviet Union would not try to win the cold war by force. The communist side would necessarily win in the long run because of its better and more efficient system. For the western communists, peaceful coexistence meant a that the a communist take-over in the West now was at best considered in the very long run and given a very low priority by the Kremlin.[20] Focus shifted southwards to the newly independent states in Asia and Africa and Western Europe left to attend its own petty businesses