Social Europe, the Road Not Taken: The Left and European Integration in the Long 1970s. By Aurélie Dianara Andry . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 336 pp. Hardcover, $105.00. ISBN: 978-019286-709-4.

In Social Europe, the Road Not Taken, Aurélie Dianara Andry provides a well-researched and much-needed account of European socialists’ long-forgotten efforts to promote redistributive social policies at the Community level during the 1970s. The book analyzes the political trajectory of “the Left” by focusing primarily on the work of political elites in Europe’s socialist and social-democratic parties and trade unions. It also includes discussion of the Parti Communiste Français and Partito Comunista Italiano, the communist parties of France and Italy, respectively, to the extent that their shift toward Eurocommunist agendas opened opportunities for collaboration with mainstream socialist parties.

Andry argues that an understanding of the European Left’s failed project for a “social Europe” throughout the long 1970s is crucial for historians seeking a complete explanation for the emergence of a neoliberal Europe. She shows that European socialists and, to a lesser degree communists, coalesced around an agenda calling for “economic democratization” at the European level during this period (p. 273). Andry thus insists that the long 1970s, not Jacques Delors’s tenure as the European Commission’s president, beginning in the mid-1980s, marked the “critical highpoint of ‘social Europe’ as a political project” (pp. 4–5).

In fact, Andry describes the Delors presidency, characterized by passage of the Single European Act and realization of the European Monetary Union, as a key turning point away from the redistributive agenda of the long 1970s and toward ascendant neoliberalism. In pursuit of a “social Europe” during the 1970s, Andry argues, socialists came to view an integrated Europe as a desired end in itself. When their campaign for a “social Europe” fell short, they ultimately preferred to accept a market-oriented outcome rather than abandon the European project entirely. Delors’s program for a “free-market-compatible ‘social Europe’” thus seemed “strikingly unambitious” when compared to the far-reaching reform agendas put forth by the Left in the decade prior (pp. 16, 272).

Andry begins by arguing that social measures remained absent from the European project under the postwar Keynesian social compact. Instead, the focus of European policymaking remained economic liberalization, while social policies remained primarily the domain of individual member states. She then demonstrates that twin challenges to the postwar social compact—the economic turmoil and the social unrest that blossomed around 1968—spurred socialists across Europe to reconsider the necessity of implementing social policies at the Community level.

From 1969 through 1974, European socialists began to establish a program for a “social Europe,” a project ushered along by rising leaders including, most prominently, Willy Brandt. The prospect of European enlargement to include the United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, and Norway inspired optimism that socialists might carry sway in moving European social policy leftward. The unification of European trade unions under the European Trade Union Confederation had a similar impact. Despite internal differences, European socialists agreed on a coherent agenda for a “social Europe” in 1973, in preparation for the European Commission’s upcoming negotiation of a Social Action Programme. Yet these socialist elites lacked effective strategies to secure desired policies in European institutions or to mobilize grassroots activism in support of their objectives. As a result, the program adopted by the European Council in January 1974 “fell drastically short of the Left’s expectations” (p. 162).

Andry suggests the 1973 oil crisis did not stall movements for a “social Europe” but rather propelled them leftward. The European Left, she argues, coalesced on a program that combined “Euro-Keynesian” stimulus policies with more democratic control over the means of production. Their vaguely worded statements, however, masked significant differences within the Left over the specific policies to implement their broad objectives.

Andry concludes by detailing defeated campaigns for a shortened workweek and for regulation of multinational corporations during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These examples underscore how European socialists continued to try, but ultimately failed, to enact an agenda for a “social Europe.” The French government’s 1983 decision to abandon its domestic social reforms and adopt austerity measures to remain in the European Monetary System marked the triumph of the socialists’ commitment to European integration, even at the expense of redistributive programs at home.

Overall, Andry’s work provides an important contribution to historical understanding of European integration in the long 1970s. By uncovering the understudied history of socialist politics in these years, Andry offers an important counterpoint to works that emphasize the overwhelming influence of neoliberal modes of thinking. Her work particularly complements recent works by business historians such as Neil Rollings and Grace Ballor, who have studied the role of business lobbying in the European integration process. Together, this growing body of work underscores the contingency of both the European integration process and the market-oriented turn of the long 1970s.

Still, Andry’s tendency to lump a diverse array of groups, ranging from Eurocommunists to moderate social democrats, into the single category of the “European Left” seeking a “social Europe” may frustrate those inclined to emphasize the differences and distinctions among them. Andry claims that advocates of a “social Europe” failed in part because they were unable to agree on a unified agenda and mobilize support at the grassroots level. This argument, most fully analyzed in the epilogue, proves one of the book’s most compelling aspects. Yet it is somewhat overshadowed in the book’s six main chapters by Andry’s meticulous detailing of socialists’ agreed-upon policy agendas, which suggest an impressive degree of coherence.

Nevertheless, Andry merits praise for undertaking the important spadework of documenting the shifting policy programs that fell under the banner of “social Europe” in the long 1970s. Her book lays critical groundwork that should invite future scholarship on this decade, the trajectory of European integration, and the history of the European Left.