Mon, Jun 18
|Manila
Reinventing Social Democracy: Keynote Speech by Joel Rocamora
What then are the lessons we can glean from the European experience? We have to start with their very different histories and social and economic situations.
Time & Location
Jun 18, 2018, 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM
Manila, Manila, Metro Manila, Philippines
About the event
Monday, 18 June 2018
I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall on TV in Amsterdam in 1989. I wanted to provoke my companions who were mainly national liberation movement supporters. I said out loud – “That’s it, now we’re all social democrats”. Little did I know that the coming years would bring about not the ascendancy of social democratic parties but their slow seemingly inexorable decline. It is no consolation that national liberation movements also left the stage of history.
Today if we look at Western Europe, the heartland of social democracy, it is only in Portugal where there seems to be a viable Left political trend. In Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, most recently Italy, social democratic parties are being marginalized by right wing, populist parties. Austerity policies have decimated the social security structures, the main achievement of social democratic parties.
Non-Communist progressive political parties in Southeast Asia,1…