Moscow or shrivel into insignificance’.
‘With this Treaty, nothing is lost that had not long since been gambled away’.
‘When two states wish to establish better relations they often reach for the highest common platitude’.
In the 1970s the political landscape of western Europe started to fracture and fragment. Since the end of the First World War, mainstream politics had been divided between two political ‘families’, Left and Right, themselves internally split between ‘moderates’ and ‘radicals’. Since 1945 the two sides had drawn ever closer, but the pattern had not radically altered. The spectrum of political options available to European voters in 1970 would not have been unfamiliar to their grandparents.
The longevity of Europe’s political parties derived from a remarkable continuity in the ecology of the electorate. The choice between Labour and Conservatives in Britain, or Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in West Germany, no longer reflected deep divisions over particular policies, much less profound ‘lifestyle’ preferences as they would come to be known. In most places it was an echo of longstanding, trans-generational voting habits, determined by the class, religion or locality of the voter rather than by the party’s program. Men and women voted as their parents had voted, depending on where they lived, where they worked and what they earned.
But beneath the surface continuity a tectonic shift was taking place in the political sociology of European voters. The block vote of the white, male, employed working class—the universal bedrock of Communist and Socialist party support—was contracting and splitting. In much the same way, the ‘ideal-typical’ conservative voter—older, female, churchgoing—could no longer be counted upon to furnish the core electorate of Christian Democrat or Conservative parties. To the extent that they persisted, such traditional voters were no longer the majority. Why?
In the first place, social and geographical mobility over the course of the postwar decades had diluted fixed social categories almost beyond recognition. The Christian voting bloc in rural western France or the small towns of the Veneto, the proletarian industrial strongholds of southern Belgium or northern England, were now fissured and fragmented. Men and women no longer lived in the same places as their parents and often did very different jobs. Unsurprisingly, they saw the world rather differently as well; their political preferences began to reflect these changes, though slowly at first.
Secondly, the prosperity and social reforms of the Sixties and early Seventies had effectively exhausted the programs and vision of the traditional parties. Their very success had deprived politicians of moderate Left and Right alike of a credible agenda, especially after the spate of liberal reforms of the Sixties. The institutions of the state itself were not in dispute, nor were the general objectives of economic policy. What remained was the fine- tuning of labour relations, legislation against discrimination in housing and employment, the expansion of educational facilities and the like: serious public business, but hardly the stuff of great political debate.
Thirdly, there were now alternative denominators of political allegiance. Ethnic minorities, often unwelcome in the white working-class communities of Europe where they had arrived, were not always invited into local political or labour organizations and their politics reflected this exclusion. And lastly, the generational politics of the Sixties had introduced into public discussion concerns utterly unfamiliar to an older political culture. The ‘New Left’ might have lacked a program, but it was not short of themes. Above all, it introduced new constituencies. The fascination with sex and sexuality led naturally to sexual politics; women and homosexuals, respectively subordinate and invisible in traditional radical parties, now surfaced as legitimate historical subjects, with rights and claims. Youth, and the enthusiasms of youth, moved to center stage, especially as the voting age fell to eighteen in many places.
The prosperity of the time had encouraged a shift in people’s attention from production to consumption, from the necessities of existence to the quality of life. In the heat of the Sixties few troubled themselves much over the moral dilemmas of prosperity—its beneficiaries were too busy enjoying the fruits of their good fortune. But within a few years, many—notably among the educated young adults of north-west Europe—came to look upon the commercialism and material well-being of the Fifties and Sixties as a burdensome inheritance, bringing tawdry commodities and false values. The price of modernity, at least to its main beneficiaries, was starting to look rather high; the ‘lost world’ of their parents and grandparents rather appealing.
The politicization of these cultural discontents was typically the work of activists familiar with the tactics of more traditional parties in which they or their families had once been active. The logic of politics thus changed relatively little: the point was still to mobilize like-minded persons around a program of legislation to be enacted by the state. What was new was the organizing premise. Hitherto—in Europe—political constituencies had emerged from the elective affinities of large groups of voters defined by class or occupation, bound by a common, inherited, and often rather abstract set of principles and objectives. Policies had mattered less than allegiances.
But in the Seventies
In its rather effective mix of economic analysis, environmental concern, aesthetic discrimination and plain nostalgia, CAMRA foreshadowed many of the single-issue activist networks of years to come, as well as the coming fashion among well-heeled bourgeois-bohemians for the expensively ‘authentic’.[210] But its slightly archaic charm, not to mention the disproportion between the intensity of its activists’ engagement and the tepid object of their passion, made this particular single-issue movement necessarily somewhat quaint.
But there was nothing whimsical or quaint about other single-issue political networks, most of them—like CAMRA—organized by and for the middle class. In Scandinavia a variety of protest parties emerged in the early seventies, notably the Rural Party (later the Real Finn Party) in Finland; Morgens Glistrup’s Danish Progress Party and Anders Lange’s Norwegian Progress Party. All of them were energetically and at first uniquely devoted to the cause of tax reduction—the founding title for the Norwegian party in 1973 had been ‘Anders Lange’s Party for a Drastic Reduction in Taxes, Rates and State Intervention’, its program a single sheet of paper reiterating the demands of its name.
The Scandinavian experience was perhaps distinctive—nowhere else were tax rates so high nor public services so extensive—and certainly no single-issue parties outside the region ever did as well as Glistrup’s party, which won 15.9 percent of the Danish national vote in 1973. But anti-tax parties were not new. Their model was Pierre Poujade’s
The anti-tax parties, like the agrarian protest parties of inter-war Europe, were primarily reactive and negative—they were against unwelcome change and asked of the state above all that it remove what they saw as unreasonable fiscal burdens. Other single-issue movements had more positive demands to make of the state, or the law, or institutions. Their concerns ranged from prison reform and psychiatric hospitals through access to education and medical services and into the provision of safe food, community services, the amelioration of urban environments and access to cultural resources. All were ‘anti-consensus’ in their reluctance to confine their
