Download Free European Left Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online European Left and write the review.

Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for reform from within. In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. He contends that the EU’s response to the Eurozone crisis represents the ultimate transformation of the union into a neoliberal citadel that institutionally embeds austerity, privatization, and wage cuts. Concurrently, the rise of German hegemony has divided the EU into an unstable core and dependent peripheries. These related developments make the EU impervious to meaningful reform. The solution is therefore a direct challenge to the EU project that stresses popular and national sovereignty as preconditions for true internationalist socialism. Lapavitsas’s powerful manifesto for a left opposition to the EU upends the wishful thinking that often characterizes the debate and will be a challenging read for all on the Left interested in the future of Europe.
Organized as a series of tightly linked, comparative assessments, Mapping the West European Left provides a guide to the state of the left in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain. While all the essays are detailed historical compositions-setting recent crises and dilemmas in a longer perspective reaching back into the postwar settlement-they articulate original insights into the contemporary political conjuncture. Why did Swedish social democracy lose hegemony and direction while its Norwegian counterpart showed unexpected resilience? What was the background to the Danish rebellion against Maastricht? What are the prospects for the SPD and the Greens in post-unification Germany? Should the British Labour Party embrace electoral reform? What propelled the French Socialist Party from triumph to disaster? And why did the Italian left fail to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of the Christian Democrats? Behind the questions explored by the contributors to Mapping the West European Left lie deeper issues concerning the future of radical politics in Europe after the repudiation of Keynesianism and the end of communism. With the individual country analyses synthesized by the editors in a concise and comprehensive introductory essay, this book provides key pointers to the social forces and ideological platforms that offer lines of advance to the left today.
A historical analysis of radical left parties and movements in Europe spanning the late 1960s to the anti-austerity movements of the late 2000s
In an in-depth comparative analysis, Stefano Bartolini studies the history of socialism and working-class politics in Western Europe. While examining the social contexts, organizational structures, and political developments of thirteen socialist experiences from the 1860s to the 1980s, he reconstructs the steps through which social conflict was translated and structured into an opposition, as well as how it developed its different organizational and ideological forms, and how it managed more or less successfully to mobilize its reference groups politically.
This book evaluates the transformational process of left populism across grassroots, national and European levels and asks what we can do to harness the power of broad-based, popular left politics. While the right is using populist rhetoric to great effect, the left's attempts have been much less successful. Syriza in Greece and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in Britain have both failed to introduce socialism in their countries, while Podemos has had better fortune in Spain and is now in government with the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party. Bringing a wealth of experience in political organising, Marina Prentoulis argues that left populism is a political logic that brings together isolated demands against a common enemy. She looks at how egalitarian pluralism could transform economic and political institutions in a radical, democratic direction. But each party does this differently, and the key to understanding where to go from here lies in a serious analysis of the roots of each movement's base, the forms of party organisation, and the particular national contexts. This book is a clear and holistic approach to left populism that will inform anyone wanting to understand and move forward positively in a bleak time for the left in Europe.
With the stability of the European Union under threat and tensions between the national and supranational increasing, what will happen to the EU party system? For the internationalist European left, European integration and the role of transnational parties represent a central contention and concern. In May 2004, the European radical left, representing parties to the left of social democracy and the Green party family, created the transnational European Left Party (EL), uniting parties like the German Die Linke, Italian Rifondazione Comunista and Greek Syriza. In 2009, the EL fought the European Parliament elections on the basis of a common manifesto, emerging over the last decade as an apparently stable actor at EU level. As the first detailed study of the EL this book analyses the role of the party in European politics and the politics of the European radical left. What challenges will the EL have to overcome in order for it to become a significant force for the creation of a genuine, democratic European polity? To what degree has the EL enabled an increase in the electoral or policy influence of the radical left in Europe? Written by two of the foremost experts on the European left, this book is essential reading to those interested in how the left has fared in post-crisis Europe.
The Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) is one of the most hotly debated ideas of recent years on the left - and, indeed, right. The potential threat to millions of current jobs posed by robotization and artificial intelligence combined with the rise of inequality has contributed to making it a core element of the continuing post-crisis discussions on what it means to be on the left, or a social democrat, today and in the future. Is an unconditional basic income without means-test or work-test compatible with social justice and individual self-worth? Does it open up the space for an end to demeaning labour and a resurgence of voluntary work and cultural life? Is it affordable? This collection of short but compelling essays, all previously published in Social Europe, allows both proponents and opponents to make their case and is designed to extend this vital discussion to a wider audience. We are proud to have spearheaded the debate on an issue that is of vital and enduring importance for Europe and beyond.
"Eurocommunism constitutes a 'moment' of great transformation connecting the past and present of the European Left. Left-wing politics effected a definitive transition to a thoroughly different paradigm in the wake of 1968 - a pivotal year of social revolt and rethinking that caused a divide between radical, progressive and socialist thinking in western and southern Europe and the Soviet model. Communist parties in Italy, France, Spain and Greece changed tack, drew on the dynamics of social radicalism of the time and became associated with political moderation, liberal democracy and negotiation rather than contentious politics, forging a movement that held influence until the early 1980s"--
Liberal left orthodoxy holds that Brexit is a disastrous coup, orchestrated by the hard right and fuelled by xenophobia, which will break up the Union and turn what’s left of Britain into a neoliberal dystopia. Richard Tuck’s ongoing commentary on the Brexit crisis demolishes this narrative. He argues that by opposing Brexit and throwing its lot in with a liberal constitutional order tailor-made for the interests of global capitalists, the Left has made a major error. It has tied itself into a framework designed to frustrate its own radical policies. Brexit therefore actually represents a golden opportunity for socialists to implement the kind of economic agenda they have long since advocated. Sadly, however, many of them have lost faith in the kind of popular revolution that the majoritarian British constitution is peculiarly well-placed to deliver and have succumbed instead to defeatism and the cultural politics of virtue-signalling. Another approach is, however, still possible. Combining brilliant contemporary political insights with a profound grasp of the ironies of modern history, this book is essential for anyone who wants a clear-sighted assessment of the momentous underlying issues brought to the surface by Brexit.
Democracy in Europe has been a recent phenomenon. Only in the wake of World War II were democratic frameworks secured, and, even then, it was decades before democracy truly blanketed the continent. Neither given nor granted, democracy requires conflict, often violent confrontations, and challenges to the established political order. In Europe, Geoff Eley convincingly shows, democracy did not evolve organically out of a natural consensus, the achievement of prosperity, or the negative cement of the Cold War. Rather, it was painstakingly crafted, continually expanded, and doggedly defended by varying constellations of socialist, feminist, Communist, and other radical movements that originally blossomed in the later nineteenth century. Parties of the Left championed democracy in the revolutionary crisis after World War I, salvaged it against the threat of fascism, and renewed its growth after 1945. They organized civil societies rooted in egalitarian ideals which came to form the very fiber of Europe's current democratic traditions. The trajectories of European democracy and the history of the European Left are thus inextricably bound together. Geoff Eley has given us the first truly comprehensive history of the European Left--its successes and failures; its high watermarks and its low tides; its accomplishments, insufficiencies, and excesses; and, most importantly, its formative, lasting influence on the European political landscape. At a time when the Left's influence and legitimacy are frequently called into question, Forging Democracy passionately upholds its vital contribution.