SPEECH BY ROBIN COOK MP   12 FEBRUARY 2001
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SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN A GLOBAL ERA

I am glad to have this opportunity to address the Olof Palme International Centre.

Olof Palme was the embodiment of the modern social democratic spirit. In many ways, he was ahead of his time.

He was an internationalist who fought injustice abroad as passionately as he fought it at home. It is a tragedy that he never lived to see the end of apartheid in South Africa that he had done so much to bring about.

And at home, Olof Palme understood that social solidarity and economic success go hand in hand. But he also realised that social democracy had to adapt in the face of new challenges.

Today, social democracy faces the challenge of a new global era. Social democrats approach that challenge from a position of strength in the modern Europe.

I am conscious that in Sweden social democracy is long established as the party of government.  Throughout my lifetime, the Social Democratic Party has been in office in Sweden, barring only the occasional interruption.  As a result, Sweden is identified around the globe with the core values of social democracy which it demonstrates at home - social justice, open democracy, environmental protection and equality of opportunity - and is respected for demonstrating those same values abroad - combating world poverty and promoting peacekeeping.

What is less usual is the strength of social democracy throughout the rest of the European Union.  When we meet in Berlin in three months for the congress of the Party of European Socialists, we will bring together the ruling parties of most of the European Union.

Eleven out of the fifteen Member States have social democrat parties in government.  Ten out of fifteen Heads of Government belong to social democrat parties.  Never before have Britain, Italy, Germany and France shared social democrat governments at the same time.

During the Eighties and early Nineties, it was the Right who held the ascendancy in Europe. The challenge for the left of centre is to ensure that the first decade of the new century is one in which social democracy can continue to set the political agenda of Europe in the way that conservatism and monetarism did for most of the last two decades of the century past.

Our objective must be to make social democracy the natural force for government in Europe.

But if we are to succeed in retaining the confidence of the public, we must show them that we are capable of producing the new ideas and fresh solutions required by rapidly changing challenges and opportunities. To retain leadership, a governing party must modernise itself as fast as the society it serves is modernising.

Social democracy promotes modernisation because our ethos is built on basic values, not a rigid doctrine. Our values of freedom, fairness and solidarity remain a constant guide to us, but the policies by which we deliver our objectives of full employment, quality public services and a just society have always been open to change.

It is characteristic of the global era that there is no stable state, only constant transition. In that era, social democracy must embrace permanent reformism. Constant modernisation is the condition for our policies to be relevant, popular and successful.

Today, I want to advance six key challenges which social democracy must embrace if we are to sustain our leading role in Europe for the next decade.

- First, social democrats must translate our internationalist values into effective international partnerships.

- Second, social democrats must deliver growth and jobs by harnessing the potential of the knowledge-driven economy.

- Third, social democrats must demonstrate that social justice is now a condition of economic efficiency.

- Fourth, social democrats must provide the Active State that is necessary to a successful modern economy.

- Fifth, social democrats must prove we are the best guarantors of the open society required in the global era.

- Sixth, social democrats must lead the debate on how to strengthen and reform the European Union.

Let me start, as is appropriate in the global era, with the need for international partnership.

We live in an era in which the pace of change is driven by powerful global trends.  Economic growth is determined by global trade, which is expanding at triple the rate of output.  Technological advance and managerial know-how are spread by record foreign investment.  

The extraordinary capacity of the new technology to communicate instantly and cheaply around the globe has produced the death of distance as a defining barrier between states or even continents.  No national economy is now an island.  And every nation state is as interdependent as it is independent.  

In the twenty-first century, on one side of the political divide will be political forces who are cosmopolitan and outward-looking, who welcome foreign contact as enriching, who are comfortable building international alliances and who are tolerant of people from different ethnic identities.  Social democrats, with their values of solidarity and partnership, and their long tradition of internationalism, have all these characteristics and can therefore respond confidently and creatively to the challenges of a global era.

On the other side of the political divide will be those who are isolationist and inward-looking, who feel threatened by foreign contact and who discriminate against other ethnic identities.  The unsettling and disruptive effects of globalisation mean that there will be some resonance for such popular chauvinism.  But retreating into narrow nationalism and past models of the free-standing nation state will not halt the accelerating pressures of globalisation.  All it will do is doom those who adopt that posture to oppositionalist politics. It is never wise to demonstrate strength by heroic resistance to reality.

That is why the global era has reduced the Right in most of Europe to opposition.  Rightist forces have difficulty in coming to terms with the new world, which puts a premium on working together and imposes a penalty on narrow nationalism.  It is a dilemma that is proving particularly acute for the British Conservative Party, who have such difficulty working with foreigners that they have just withdrawn from the European People's Party, the network of right-wing parties.

By contrast, the social democratic, socialist and labour parties are united in the Party of European Socialists, a political alliance which brings together parties in every Member State and in most governments of the European Union. This is an immense asset, of which social democrats should make more use.

We should use it more as a campaigning organisation. The political debate on European issues is not confined to the period of European elections, nor should campaigning by the PES.

We should use it more as a clearing house for new ideas. In the communication age, we should ourselves be more rapid and more organised in the exchange of new approaches we are each developing separately in response to common problems.

We should use it more as a solidarity network. Within the European Union, we can develop more common positions.  Beyond the European Union, we must offer support to our sister parties in Central and Eastern Europe in strengthening the base for social democracy ahead of enlargement.

A broad programme of reform has been developed under the guidance of Rudolf Scharping and will be put before us at the Berlin Congress. It will make the PES more effective in its leadership structure, more flexible in taking the initiative and with clearer identity with our member parties. It will equip each of our national parties with a more valuable international alliance.

The second challenge for social democrats is to prove that we can harness the potential of the knowledge-driven economy. Our ability to deliver jobs for our citizens and security for their families will be the central condition of our continued success.  

Too often in the past, at any rate too often in Britain, social democracy has sold itself as a force that was interested in redistributing income, but not interested enough in creating it.  Yet, the benefits we want for our people - jobs, security, good health and a clean environment - are more likely to flow from a dynamic economy.

The fashionable economic school on the Right for the past generation has been a brutal neo-liberalism.  This school of thought can only see one response to global competition.  It tries to compete internationally by trading down nationally.  It therefore offers a policy mix of reducing wages, stripping away workplace rights and cutting public services in order to reduce tax.  It is a sort of reverse Darwinism - seeking survival through degrading the quality of life rather than selective improvement of it.

This policy mix is not only profoundly unattractive, but is equally profoundly wrong.  A knowledge-based economy is a people-centred economy.  Successful competition is most likely to be achieved by those countries that invest most in the skills of their people.

The wealth of nations today depends not on the ownership of capital machinery but on the development of the knowledge, initiative and energy of its people.  That is why our long tradition of concern for developing human potential to the full makes social democrats better able to deliver a dynamic economy against world competition.

In the present time, social democratic governments are proving themselves skilled in creating the environment for thriving economies.  

In France, the Socialists are building on their impressive job creation record with a new employment package which includes a 'job bonus' to support low paid workers in the labour market.  

In the Netherlands, the Labour Party has pioneered the shift from a passive to an active welfare state, which helps benefit claimants back into employment.  

In Sweden, the goal Goran Persson set of cutting unemployment by half in four years, which some said was impossible, has been achieved.

And at the European level, it is social democratic governments that have taken the initiative for economic reform. It was because of the new strength of social democracy across Europe that we secured a commitment at Lisbon to the goal of full employment in Europe and to improve gender equality by raising the percentage of the adult population who are economically active.  

By contrast, when the Right was in the ascendancy, there was no European commitment to employment and no attempt to pursue policies that would maximise the opportunities for employment.  It is their legacy of mass unemployment that social democrats across Europe have been tackling with great success.

The third challenge for social democrats is to demonstrate that social justice is now a key condition of economic progress.  That is not, of course, why social democrats demand it.  Our commitment to social justice is a product of our concern for those who endure poverty.  Solidarity is the core of the social democrats ethos.  Our value system has roots in humanist thinking which insisted that rights are universal to every human being.

Nor are we concerned only by the material deprivation of poverty.  We believe in the equal worth of all children and in their equal right to develop to the full the extraordinary potential of a human being.  We deplore poverty because of its malign role in stunting creativity and talent and producing educational failure.  

In the global era, no economy can remain competitive if it writes off the talents, the energy, the potential of a significant part of its workforce.  If the strength of an economy rests on the talents of its people, it follows that the more some people are excluded from economic opportunity, the weaker the economy will be.  The more we tackle social exclusion, the stronger will be an economy enriched by the talents of all of the people.

We can now see that social justice benefits everyone.  Social exclusion does not just disadvantage its victims, it undermines the economic efficiency of the whole of society.  

This is an opportunity for social democrats who have better credentials than anyone else to eliminate social exclusion.  It requires action by us on three fronts.  

First, investment in a quality education provided as a public service.

Second, we must prevent a digital divide creating new barriers to social exclusion.

Third, we must modernise welfare to meet the bold target a number of us have set of eliminating child poverty in a generation.

All of this will only be possible through public policies pursued by progressive Governments, which brings me to the fourth challenge for social democrats - to provide the Active State which is needed in a changing world.

Only a couple of decades ago, it was fashionable to predict the downsizing of Government as the private sector took over the role of public authorities, and economic forces escaped domestic regulation by going global.  In the eighties, the Right asserted as a point of faith that Government Does Not Work, and in Britain we sometimes suspected they had got elected in order to prove the point.  

Yet the longer we are exposed to a global era, the more we recognise that it produces new demands for an Active State.  The pace of technological change and global competition bring new problems of personal insecurity.

My grandfather spent his entire working life at pits within walking distance of his home.  It was a standard experience for his generation who neither had the opportunity to get on the educational escalator nor face the threat of rapid technological obsolescence.

Today, a normal life cycle at work will cover half a dozen job changes in response to changing technology, new skills, and shifting markets.  The citizen has a new need for the stability that only an Active State can supply to help cope with the new insecurity of modern employment.  

It would be futile to attempt to impose stability by regulations that are devised to halt change.  The intelligent response is to equip individual citizens to adapt to new opportunities and to support them through the process of adjustment to change.  

Social democrats are the natural providers of the political package that responds to the insecurity of the worker in a global era.

-   Active labour market policies that provide a bridge from old industries to new opportunities.

-   Quality welfare systems that support families through functional unemployment between jobs.  

-   Education services that provide opportunities for lifelong learning and empower workers to take advantage of new technologies rather than be displaced by them.

-   Healthcare provided on the basis of human need, not purchasing power.  

Social democrats must and can demonstrate that they can manage the market economy better than those on the Right, who regard the market as a master rather than a servant.  But we must also demonstrate that only an Active State can guarantee that healthcare for the sick or personal care for the elderly are delivered as public services responding to human needs, not left to a market trading in them as commodity goods.

That is why in Lionel Jospin's phrase, social democrats say 'Yes to the market economy and No to the market society.'

The fifth challenge for social democrats is to guarantee the open society required by a global era.

The global era has produced global population movements.  Of course, population movement has been a natural condition of humanity through the ages.  After all, there are more people of Scandinavian descent in Britain than in Scandinavia, thanks to first the Vikings, then the Danes, and eventually the Normans.

Yet today's population movements as a result of modern mobility have achieved a breadth and a richness without parallel in history.  In contemporary London, there are over 300 languages spoken.  This diversity is an immense asset.  It brings strength to our economy, enriches our culture, and broadens our understanding of the world.  It gives us a competitive edge.

Legitimate immigration is the necessary and unavoidable result of economic success which generates a demand for labour faster than can be met by the birth-rate of a modern developed country.  There is no more evil business than trafficking in human beings and nothing corrodes social cohesion worse than a furtive underground of illegal migrants beyond legal protection against exploitation.  We must co-operate across Europe to defeat the organised crime that feeds off the illegal trade in migration.  But we must also ensure that legal migrants have the full opportunity to contribute their skills and talents to the countries they have chosen as their home.

Here again the values and ethos of social democrats make us better able to rise to this modern challenge.  The universality of rights in which we believe is not limited by colour or creed.  That is why it has been social democrats who have led the way with legislation across Europe to oppose discrimination and to ban expressions of race hatred.  

There is of course an international counterpart to the way we treat immigrants.  Bigotry and racism towards the incomer is parent to xenophobia towards the foreigner.  Those who cannot come to terms with ethnic diversity at home will have even greater problems building successful alliances abroad with their countries of origin.

Conversely, those of us who support pluralism at home are better able to build partnerships abroad.  A multi-ethnic society is better able to adapt to a multi-polar world.

The final challenge for social democrats is to lead the debate on how to strengthen and reform the European Union.  

Historically, the Right made a valuable contribution to the construction of Europe.  Adenauer in Germany and De Gaulle in France were major architects of the foundations of Europe, and pioneered the historic rapprochement that made the Europe of today possible.

Yet today, in many Member States, the Right is the force of opposition to Europe.  It can be seen at its most extreme in the offensive hostility to foreigners of Jorg Haider, whose xenophobia is in flat opposition to the tolerance on which Europe is built.  It can be seen at its most unreal in the British Conservative Party, who talk openly about picking and choosing which European laws they would observe, without recognising that without common laws, there can be no single market.

The problem for the Right is self-evident.  Their instinctive nationalism makes it hard for them to reconcile themselves to an interdependent era in which decision-making is international.  Yet any attempt to renationalise decision-making dooms them to a hopeless attempt to live in the past and prevents them from offering any contribution to the future of Europe.

Conversely, social democracy is an ideology built on the principle that we are stronger together than we are as individual citizens or individual states.  Social democracy is therefore the natural force to provide leadership to the European project.

We do not seek a successful European Union because of some abstract vision or because we relish a life of perpetual constitutional debate.  We want an efficient European Union because it is essential if we are to deliver the prosperity, the quality of life and the personal security which our people want.  

They need the scale of the single market to promote their exports and the strength of the European Union to secure good trade agreements around the globe.  They need cooperation across the European Union to defeat cross-border crime and illegal migration from beyond our external borders.  They need the common approach of the European Union to halt acid rain and to stabilise the global climate.  And they need the legal standards of the European Union to protect the consumer and to ensure that wherever goods are produced within the single market, they all meet the same quality and safety.

This is what makes it so perverse for the Right to attack Europe as infringing national sovereignty.  It is the trend to global trade, the rise in cross-border crime and the contempt of environmental change for frontier controls that present the old model of sovereign isolation with a problem.  The European Union is the solution.  It gives every Member State a better means to respond to the challenges of a global era.  That is not a threat to their national interests.  By pooling sovereignty, they are better able to serve the national interests of their people.

But our support for the European Union must not leave us complacent about the European Union.  On the contrary, it is those who support the European Union who should most want to see it reformed.  If social democrats are to earn the trust of our public - as the people who can build a successful European Union - then we must listen to the public when they complain that decision-making in the European Union is remote or that there is too much financial inefficiency in the system.  It is because we know how much we need a successful European Union that we demand the reforms that will make it more efficient, more transparent and more in touch with the people.

As a result of the conclusions at the Nice European Council, we now have an excellent opening to listen to what the people want of their European Union.  Nice set out an ambitious programme for reform in 2004, including for the first time a clear definition of the role and competences of the Union and the freedoms and rights of the Member States.  It is a long time to 2004, but the Swedish Presidency was tasked with starting the process by launching a consultation with the European public.  Social democrats should seize this opportunity and be seen to lead the project to give the public a voice.  The Future of Europe should not be a debate in which only the voice of Foreign Ministers or MEPs is heard.  It should be open to our citizens, our voters and the young people who will provide our future leaders.

The European Union is a unique political model.  It is the first time that sovereign states have voluntarily come together to pool sovereignty on issues where they have become interdependent, while retaining their distinct status as nations.  The smaller Member States attach particular importance to the principle that the equal sovereignty of all members entitles them to equal rights as states within the Union.

The unique and innovative character of the European Union means that none of our many languages contain a political lexicon that can easily describe the new European model.  We will need new terms to describe the new concepts.

Nor should we try to mimic established models.  As Joschka Fischer has said, nobody wants to turn the EU into the US.  Or as Hubert Vedrine has said, it is inconceivable that historic nations such as France, Sweden or Austria will ever settle for the status of a Virginia or a Massachusetts.

The task for 2004 is to develop the unique character of the European Union and to find the balance between the European Union and the Member States.  The nations of Europe are bound together by common interests, shared values and a joint heritage.  The nations who make up Europe need a European Union that gives them more strength in the world and more ability to solve common problems with their own continent.

Yet each nation is also defined by its own history, language and culture.  That sense of identity is valued by social democracy because it provides the basis of social solidarity, and the cohesion of national democracy.  The European Union is stronger with strong Member States that promote the rich cultural diversity of Europe and respect the democratic roots of Europe.

It is essential that the candidate countries can contribute their ideas to the preparations for 2004.  The Future of Europe is their future also.  That is why at Nice we agreed that those candidates who had concluded negotiations by 2004 should join us as participants in the InterGovernmental Conference whether or not the formalities of ratification had been completed.

The Right no longer expresses itself with enthusiasm for enlargement.  Jorg Haider may be unique in his offensiveness, but he is not alone on the Right in fishing for votes in the fear of enlargement.

Yet a Fortress Europe model would never work.  If Central and Eastern Europe were kept outside our walls in a state of relative poverty, Europe would be condemned to a growth in cross-border crime and illegal migration.  We are much more likely to build our security and their stability by embracing the new democracies into full membership and enabling them to share our levels of prosperity and our standards of freedom.  Social democrats must be united in acting as the champions of enlargement and its premise that we will both benefit if the relationship between us is fairer and embodies a core message of social democracy.

I have set out the new challenges to social democracy, and why we can face them with confidence.  Confidence because our spirit of internationalism and our constant commitment to reform have never been more relevant.  

The future will present us with many uncomfortable developments.  There will be advances in technology which will disrupt established forms of work.  There will be further increases in mobility which will make it harder work to preserve settled communities.  There will be an increase in the pace at which economic troubles in one part of the world transfer themselves to another.

It would be surprising if today we had been able to spot all the challenges that will confront us.  It is therefore more important that we develop a sound working method of how to respond to new problems than futilely try to have answers worked out today.  The vital elements of a successful working method in the global era will be consultation, cooperation and mutual support between us and across frontiers.  There is no longer a purely national road to social democracy.  The overall conclusion therefore is a very healthy social democratic message - we will only succeed if we work better together.