All you had to do was to turn your route around? Post-keynesian Social-Democracy and its ideological dilemmas - doi: 10.4025/actascihumansoc.v32i2.8569

Abstract

The present article deals with the ideological and strategical problems of Social Democracy as a political tendency. The aim is to debate the paths taken by Social Democracy from the initial dilemmas concerning the position to be adopted in face of the nascent XIX-century-democracy and the impasses of the first government experiences to the “finding” of Keynesianism and the consolidation of the “social-democratic way of governing” and its subsequent crisis that led the main European social-democratic parties to the present crossroad. I make a distinction between Social Democracy and welfare state in order to understand the real contribution of Social Democracy to the building and consolidation of the distinct existent welfare systems and, especially, the relevance of the political-ideological and “strategic” differences between social-democratic/socialist and liberal/conservative parties of today. In order to illustrate the present ideological crossroad, I take the cases of Spain under Felipe González’s socialist government (1982-1996) and Germany’s social-democratic government under Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005).