Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins, Challenges, Prospects

This book takes the less-explored but very welcome approach of investigating the origins, current state and prospects of "social-democracy" not within the "developed world", where it is usually seen to be naturally located, but on the "global periphery". Taking four current examples of Chile, Costa Rica, Mauritius and the Indian state of Kerala, all of which have been defined as "social-democracies" by various observers, the book goes on to examine the different ways in which each of these states has attempted to overcome the pressures of neo-liberalism to construct "social market economies". The tone of the book is optimistic and clearly very supportive of attempts in the "developing world" to balance popular, democratic demands with the pressure for growth within a market economy while also providing a critical, analytical account of how this has been achieved. The authors break down variant approaches to social-democracy under three broad headings: 1)The "radical" model, which is ideologically democratic-socialist and aims at an evolutionary path towards an ultimate, fundamental reorientation in the balance of class power away from the owners of capital and towards the unpropertied people, that is, a long-term transition from social-democracy to democratic-socialism (this model is represented in the book by the Indian state of Kerala). 2)A "traditional" model (represented by Costa Rica and Mauritius) of "welfare-state capitalism" that essentially follows the same patterns as Western-European "mixed economies" i.e. combining state intervention and a welfare safety-net as "correctors" to the market economy. 3)A "Third-Way" model (represented by Chile) which is more clearly free-market oriented and influenced by the direction taken by the British "New Labour" party i.e. a "third way" between neo-liberalism and traditional Keynesian "welfare capitalism". The book takes a historical approach that has the virtue of embedding its analysis in the concrete conditions of the societies under examination and makes full use of class analysis as a means of explaining the background to why various societies have adopted particular models, avoiding theoretical abstractions and remaining firmly grounded in the global political-economy of our times. This book would be an excellent addition to any university reading list on globalisation, political theory, political-economy or socialist thought and would make good sense read together with Karl Polanyi, J.M. Keynes and Karl Marx. Although this is an excellent reference book and truly superbly researched, its central thesis, on examination, that social democracy is a viable path to "development" for the "global periphery" requires a serious critique at the level of some of its fundamental assumptions. Social-democracy is, virtually by definition in the current era, an ideology of "compromise between social classes" and the instability in this compromise appears particularly visibly today, even in the