Just after the death of Croatia’s first president, Franjo Tuđman, at the end of 1999, when domestic political parties, Social Democratic Party of Croatia (SDP) being one of them, started to break free from earlier pressure of war and post-war reality, which dominantly set the course of action for political forces, new “factuality coercions” appeared. Before we point them out, we should recall that the 1990s, when domestic social democracy was going through its most difficult period (in the second parliament of 1992, SDP had 11 representatives, and three years later even less, only 10 representatives), were also times when international social democracy was put on defensive and agreed to immense concessions, in other words, it deliberately conceded to the neoliberal project which was at its peak.

At the beginning of the 1990-s, Bill Clinton’s New Democrats were the first to embrace the “necessary cuts” in sectors of education and social policy, while simultaneously spreading fear among the population about supposedly fast-growing rates of criminal and with it giving prominence to security policy as society’s main priority. The Labour under Tony Blair continued with the same policy, although in somewhat more elaborate terms, especially after April 1995, when Labour Party during its congress radically shifted its programme and steered it in direction of compromise with capital and market. The third important member of the so-called “Third Way” was the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which under the leadership of Gerhard Schröder developed a new doctrine called Die neue Mitte, culminating with the Agenda 2010, which laid out the cuts in social spending Germany hadn’t seen since the Second World War.

Pragmatism and Passivity

A new set of external pressures refers to global domination of economic issues and insistence on a new political course of social democracy, which would, to use the words of Anthony Giddens, include the depoliticization of society, deideologization of politics and democratization of democracy.

British Labour had rejected the idea of class struggle in their programme and replaced it with the idea of representing the whole nation instead of just one class. Such turn from class to people can also be clearly observable in domestic social democracy since the very beginning of the multiparty system, but during the first ten years even such a concession, that is, the practising of a more national than class aware politics, won’t help it in achieving better election results.

From the beginning of the century up to now, the main feature defining domestic social democracy is its complete, and therefore often uncritical devotion to country’s membership in Euro-Atlantic associations. Thus, all its politics, first of all, its foreign policy, is calibrated in order to reach that goal. In general, SDP is a party that has, in its quarter-century-long activity, been demonstrating it’s not a political force that gladly interferes with socio-political currents, i.e. it’s not a political force – although it should be, at least according to its tradition and initial habitus – which decisively interferes with historical currents. It prefers to passively surrender to the imperatives of the present and promotes achieving agreements as the main principle of its agency. In other words, SDP doesn’t have any vision for the future that surpasses existing political horizon.

Entrepreneurial Party

In approximately that kind of context SDP in the year 2000 experienced its first parliamentary victory in a coalition with a group of liberal parties. The first mandate of social democrats, under the leadership of Ivica Račan, also had lasting importance for the party. More or less, all the main political decisions about the way the state and society should be led were adopted and put into effect back in those times. Labour Act that SDP led coalition voted in 2014, only followed lines that Račan’s government established already in 2003. Generally speaking, social democrats, just as the government under its control, was led by approximately this kind of politics: as far as fiscal policy goes, all income produced by growth was more preferably transferred in direction of budget consolidation, rather than rerouted to redistribution.

Usual scenario would be that after budget consolidation was done, previous level of redistribution was no longer regarded as important. Tax policies were also directed towards activating the labour market, especially through self-employment and not in the direction of redistribution. In that sense, in the past 15 years, the term “human capital” came into use, so employment policies went in the direction of strengthening of that concept. And that means encouraging self-employment, persisting on retraining and putting forward the idea of lifelong learning. Spreading the mechanisms of atypical forms of employment should be added to that, alongside a gradual, but irreversible abandonment of traditional forms of protection of full-time employed workers. In social policy, privatization of those services is preferred. One of the most important examples of that had been an attempt of the SDP led government to outsource auxiliary jobs in public and state companies and institutions, failed in the end under union pressure.

Speaking of outsourcing, it is interesting that the social democratic government gladly entrusted the overall social life to the so-called civil or third sector. But the novelty that had truly astonished and caught Prime Minister Milanović and his government by surprise is the fact that civil society can also be right-wing oriented and hostile towards a nominally left-oriented government. They got that lesson via two referendums, one organized around the issue of marital unions and the announced one (never realized) dealing with the issue of usage of Cyrillic script in Vukovar. But the fact that the tool (referendum), just as the concept (civil society) are in fact ideologically adaptable, has been common knowledge for a long time. For example, it’s well-known that the American right-wing civil sector at the beginning of the 1970s tried and partially succeeded, precisely by using referendums on local and wider levels, to depreciate a wide range of accomplishments that were won in radical 1960s, mainly in domain of education (the return of religious teaching and anthem in schools, role of parent committees, introduction of creationism in the curriculum, affirmation of homeschooling etc.)

As far as policy concerning the industry goes, since SDP had abandoned its traditional base, that is the workers, it turned to the entrepreneurs, in that sense also following a worldwide trend of nominally Left-oriented governments looking for support in business circles. Therefore, a photo taken in Zagreb’s disco club Pepermint, which shows the then Prime Minister Milanović cruising with Emil Tedeschi, the owner of Atlantic Group and Croatia’s second biggest entrepreneur, is nothing more than a genre-photo of Croatian, but also international social democracy, proving that Left politics enjoys hanging with the capital. In that context, it’s no surprise that all eyes are upon direct foreign investments or European capital, while the domestic economy is going through process of complete tertiarization and deindustrialisation. In consequence, politics of last SDP government didn’t go further of verbal displays of the governing, and controversies over the way they appointed this or that official, without any significant political effects.

Reconstructions Without Change

The aforementioned notion of “factuality coercions” was borrowed from a text written by political scientist Zvonko Posavec about twenty years ago, in which he described structural impossibilities to act on the Left in Croatia in any substantial way. He had noticed that such a situation, among other things, also leads to an absence of differences in the programmes of political parties. Indeed, what the Left government can do – or any other government which will stay within the so far described boundaries, whatever party may lead it – is more or less to deal with state budget accounting. Since everything is turned over to the hands of others, be it under coercion or voluntarily, domestic administration is left with very few obligations. Military issues are under the command of foreign military alliance called NATO, financial policy is governed by Brussels through programmes of public debt and budget deficit control, social issues have been voluntarily handed over to the
hands of the so-called third sector, and industrial policy have for a long time
been in the domain of fortune telling – pondering over whether there’ll be
any foreign investments or not.

Realpolitik of SDP in its’ two terms in power wasn’t dictated by any kind of predetermined or prefixed set of rules, but relied more on decision making depending on the situation at hand. That is a result of a substance crisis of social democracy en tout. If in core European countries it hasn’t been possible to overcome this crisis, even with a very ambitious reformist effort of consolidating socialist and liberal concepts, it would be unrealistic to expect more success in peripheral, Croatian context.

Rade Dragojević

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