Social democracy and the postcolonial order

1969年之后的几年里，七个社会民主党在欧洲掌权，开始为各自国家的外交政策制定雄心勃勃的新计划。自第二次世界大战以来，这些国家现在第一次拥有了社会民主主义的外交政策，而且打破了处理国际事务的长期国家传统。一方面，外交政策的新转变是对政策制定者所看到的快速变化的全球形势的回应。dsamtente似乎克服了“冷战”，世界各区域日益增长的“相互依存”使新的全球问题提上了议程，布雷顿森林体系即将瓦解，非殖民化产生了许多新国家，它们在国际舞台上确立了有影响力的角色。另一方面，社会民主主义政府决心利用这一感知到的流动性时刻，按照他们的愿景塑造国际体系。在他们看来，发展与全球南方的前瞻性关系是这一努力中最重要的任务之一。该项目考察了这些政府如何在1970年代和1980年代通过面对新兴后殖民秩序的问题创造了一种新的社会民主外交政策。它侧重于三个特定的政府和他们在两个重要领域的政策，研究德国，荷兰和瑞典在关于创建“新国际经济秩序”的辩论中的作用，以及他们对殖民或少数民族统治和南部非洲解放运动的态度。人们普遍认为，解决这两个问题对社会民主和国际政治的未来都至关重要。该项目将研究新社会民主主义外交政策的思想是如何产生的，政府是如何将其付诸实践的，以及这些新方法产生了什么结果。这里提出的研究将把社会民主主义的历史和当时被称为“北方”和“南方”冲突的历史联系起来。“它努力在三个层面上扩展我们的知识：首先，该项目突出了社会民主党在国际事务中的关键角色，同时，外交政策是社会民主党行动的一个重要领域，结合了历史学家很少关注的两个方面。其次，该项目有助于探索20世纪70年代和80年代国际秩序的转变。第三，它试图通过强调当代人对建立一个比后来出现的更公正和平等的世界秩序的期望和努力，来微妙地改变我们对这几十年作为“我们现在的开始”的理解。

Within a few years after 1969, seven social democratic parties assumed power in Europe, setting out to forge ambitious new programs for their countries’ foreign policies. For the first time since the Second World War, these countries now possessed a social democratic foreign policy that moreover broke with long-standing national traditions of navigating international affairs. On the one hand, the new departures in foreign policy responded to what policymakers saw as a rapidly changing global situation. Détente appeared to overcome the „Cold War,“ the growing „interdependence“ of world regions put new global problems on the agenda, the Bretton Woods system was about to dissolve and decolonization had produced numerous new states that established themselves as influential actors on the international stage. On the other hand, social democratic governments were determined to take advantage of this perceived moment of fluidity in order to shape the international system according to their visions. In their eyes, developing a forward-looking relationship with the global South represented one of the most significant tasks in this endeavor.This project examines how these governments created a new social democratic foreign policy during the 1970s and 1980s by means of confronting the problems of the emerging postcolonial order. It focuses on three particular governments and their policies in two important fields, studying the German, Dutch, and Swedish roles in the debates on the creation of a „New International Economic Order“ and their attitudes toward colonial or minority rule and liberation movements in Southern Africa. Resolving both issues was widely seen as essential for the future of both social democracy and international politics. The project will study how the ideas for a new social democratic foreign policy emerged, how governments put them into practice, and what results these new approaches yielded.The study proposed here will connect the history of social democracy and the history of what contemporaries termed the conflict between „North“ and „South.“ It strives to expand our knowledge on three levels: Firstly, the project highlights Social Democracy as a crucial actor in international affairs and, at the same time, foreign policy as an important field of Social Democratic action, combining two aspects that have received scant attention among historians. Secondly, the project contributes to exploring the transformation of the international order during the 1970s and 1980s. Thirdly, it seeks to nuance our understanding of these decades as the „beginning of our present“ by emphasizing contemporaries’ expectations of and attempts to bring about a more just and equal world order than the one that subsequently emerged.