European social democracy has come to broaden its agenda beyond just bread-and-butter economics issues to embrace a range of social, personal identity and environmental issues that were simply not on the horizon for its 19th century founders. While this has been in many ways a welcome development, the years of austerity since the financial crash of 2008 have shown a diffusion of focus on the core existential challenges facing citizens amid widening inequalities and threats to living standards.
It is now time, says Jonás Fernández, to reclaim the values and concerns which motivated social democracy’s founders and rediscover its redistributive roots. But while the 20th century European welfare model could be created using the vehicle of the liberal democratic state, the essential next steps cannot be made at the level of the nation state. In a globalised world, individual states lack true sovereignty and the means to effectively challenge the vast power of transnational corporations. In the European context, only the European Union has the scale to meet this challenge, but to do so its institutions need to be remodelled, strengthened and given the necessary tools. How this can be done, and the urgency of the task, is the substance of this bold yet pragmatic and realistic call to debate, reflection and action.