Politics and Antipolitics in Western Europe in the Seventies1

Abstract

In the 1964 issue of DAEDALUS entitled A New Europe?, the stability of the state and the predictability of the course of politics in advanced industrial European nations lay beyond doubt. Fifteen years later, these are the points most in ques tion. The critical issue for Western Europe today is the capacity of the principal agencies of political life?party, interest group, bureaucracy, legislature?to manage the problems of society and economy, and, beyond coping, to redefine and rediscover common purposes. Among the institutional failures of the past decade, those of the political parties stand out as critical. The late sixties and the seventies have been times of massive politicization and mobilization. That this surge of collective activity and new high levels of participation nowhere led to political transformation or even to major reforms but only to dead ends and deadlocks is principally due to the political parties: to the Left's failure to link its transformative vision to con temporary social conflicts and to define alternative strategies and outcomes; to the Center-Right's failure to replace the worn-out formulas of the fat years of growth with reformist strategies for the lean years; in general, to the parties' incapacity to translate new aspirations into political projects. The question that this argument raises but cannot answer is whether the political parties are now at a point that lies along a curve of indefinite downturn and disintegration or, rather, whether the point we have now reached is the bottom of the curve. Such a problem did not arise in the earlier Daedalus issue, for there the evolution of politics appeared firmly hitched to the locomotives of social and economic development, and they ran along predictable and universal tracks. In retrospect, this linear developmental model, and the failure of those who interpreted societies in this way to understand the cyclicity of the social phenomena whose course they were charting by extrapolation from current trends, led to the flawed anticipations of the future. Today a loss of faith in the evolutionary/developmental view of industrial societies underlies the uncer tainty about the future of politics. It inspires in this essay a far more modest ambition than that revealed in the first Daedalus issue, for the intellectual prem ises that would support construction of a picture of the Western European fu ture based on this account of current dilemmas have been entirely undermined. However sobering the current predicament of Western European govern ment and opposition parties, we can hardly conclude that their continued stag

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