Michel Rocard and the End of Something

Have I got it wrong all these years? Was it always futile to think there was a possible alternative to the global market-based capitalist economy? Did socialism in all its forms die a slow death after 1945, and expire altogether when the Berlin Wall came down?

These thoughts arise with the death over the weekend of Michel Rocard, France's prime minister  from 1988-91, and leader of a third-way current within the Socialist Party. Rocard was by all accounts a profoundly thoughtful, intellectual politician, trained at the highest levels and introduced into France's leadership caste in the 1950s, a protégé of Mendès-France. Never a Communist though initially on the Marxist left wing of the socialist movement, Rocard became convinced in the 1970s that social democracy within the framework of civil society and a market economy was the only viable compromise for achieving the social benefits the socialist movement in its various forms aspired to. Popular, a straight-talking man of great personal integrity, Rocard with his adherents represented  the right wing of the Socialist Party formed under François Mitterand, and he and Mitterand had a famously hostile relationship. Mitterand nonetheless included him in his first cabinet in 1981, and kept him on through the disaster of that first government, where it became clear that Mitterand's classic strategies of nationalization, capital controls, an authentic state socialism, were completely untenable in a globalized economy. Rocard resigned eventually, in protest of Mitterand's dubious maneuver to introduce proportional representation into the Assembly--a move that damaged the conventional right by elevating the National Front (Thanks, Tonton).

After Mitterand won reelection in 1988, he selected the still-popular Rocard to run his government, and Rocard was able to advance a social democratic agenda, including a form of guaranteed minimum income--a modest but significant addition to the social safety net.

With Blair, Clinton, and Schroeder, Rocard can be seen as a late flowering of the socialist movement, or its moment of demise in the triumphalist 'end-of-history' euphoria of the 1990s. Mitterand fired Rocard in 1991 and sabotaged his attempt to run for president in 1995. Rocard remained an elder statesman and inspiration to a younger generation of Socialist Party conservatives, including the current prime minister, Manuel Valls.

I am inclined to view Rocard as the man who led an honorable retreat from the barricades--unlike Blair and Clinton, who crossed lines and fraternized happily with the financiers. Perhaps the very French identity of intellectual--a man of books and learning as neither Clinton nor Blair was, for all their education and intelligence--was lure enough for Rocard to remain honorably in his tradition. But his moment passed, and now he has too. What is left of the French and European socialist movement he lived in and inflected is a sorry spectacle at this moment--shrill, defeatist, rudderless. Rocard may represent the end of that tradition--certainly for the present. I would have placed myself in opposition to his moderating, social democratic ways, but maybe that's because his sense of history was more acute than mine.