European Social Democracy and the 'delayed crisis of democratic capitalism': comparing Germany and the UK

This paper compares and contrasts the political fortunes of the German SPD and the UK Labour Party over the period 1989 to 2016. This timeline encompasses the collapse of communism from 1989 to 1991 and the emergence of ‘global capitalism’ (Reich, 1991; O’Brien, 1992; Ohmae, 1995) and also the global financial crisis of 2008 to the present and the partial failure of the global capitalism model (Arestis and Singh, 2010). The paper places emphasis on political developments since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 as what Wolfgang Streeck calls the ‘delayed crisis of democratic capitalism’ (Streeck, 2014) starts to unravel the postwar political settlement between capitalism and the democratic state. The paper argues that what had started as a crisis of markets has become a crisis of the democratic state and that this has presented the traditional centre-left with an existential threat – not just to specific political parties as effective political competitors but also to the European Social Democratic tradition more broadly defined.