By Gaither Stewart
(Paris) The great tower stands like a beacon over Europe. Evenings from my bedroom window I watch the magnificent tower illuminate. As day ends the searchlight at the top at 1000 feet altitude begins sweeping the sky. During last year’s French EU Presidency, as daylight departed and night fell, the gigantic iron structure progressively turned blue.
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| The tower of Babel of the European left |
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A magic moment for prescient dreamers fascinated by towers and overviews. Nostalgic views, too, which might also end in illusion, in mirage and chimera.
Like the dreamers-stevedores who down the street from me staged a manifestation against the firings of port workers. Returning home with my baguette, I found them there. A hundred or so of them from various ports from Normandy to Bretagne. Their red flags waving, drums beating, loudspeakers blaring, police nonchalant and permissive. I watched a while before turning homewards. I was only a few steps away when I heard it, the Internationale. I went back and joined a group of stevedores from Normandy . They smiled at me when I took off my cap and began faking the French version. It was composed in French in 1888, then translated into 85 languages. The hymn of international Communism, sung also by Socialists, Social Democrats and Anarchists, the Internationale was the hymn of the USSR until 1944 as it was of the student revolt on Tienanmen Square in 1989. It has always been a hymn of revolt.
2008- THE AUSTERLITZ OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY
In a recent article, Le Monde called the year 2008 the Austerlitz of Social-Democratic thought. The reference is to the great battle in Moravia where on December 5, 1805 Napoleon destroyed the armies of Russia and Austria . Last year French Socialists lost miserably in national elections that swept conservative Nicolas Sarkozy into power. Also in 2008 the French Socialist Party succumbed to the market system: for the first time since its foundation in 1905 it abandoned references to revolutionary slogans. Already in 2005 the French Socialist Party had adopted a Social Democratic program: adherence to European unity and acceptance of the reformist idea of the market economy.
That surrender of principles initiated the decline of the Socialist Party in this country. The party is split between pro- and anti-“Europeans” and between partisans of the market economy and defenders of a regulated economy. This division reflects the fundamental division of modern French Socialism since its foundation in 1905: between orthodox Marxists hostile to reformist ideas and the impulse of the main body to participation in government. That is the dilemma of European Socialism: revolution or reformism—and acceptance of the capitalist system.
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