Fintan O'Toole's recent article, "The last gasp of social democracy", is a typical piece of self-criticism from an undoubted member of the family of the left. The tendency to judge oneself harshly, more harshly than we judge others, has often been part and parcel of political discourse on the left.
For example, and Fintan will know this well, the extreme left in this country has always reserved the greatest part of its ire for the Labour Party and its leadership, rather than for Fianna Fail or Fine Gael.
Fintan's assertion that "the great paradox of European politics at the moment is that socialists can have power so long as they give up what used to be called socialism" is in my view an unfair judgement on the state of European social democracy. Surprisingly, it is also unhistorical.
What counts is what socialism is today, not what used to be called socialism, as Fintan puts it. Socialism and social democracy, like all other political families, are entitled to remould themselves to old problems in new and changing circumstances.
Fintan's perception of our movement at this stage is one of the bottle being half empty rather than half full. It is a view not shared by everybody, least of all me. Indeed there is an argument that the liberal or social democratic left has won the intellectual and political battles of the last two centuries. '
The problem is that many of the achievements of mid-century socialism, like the welfare state, we take for granted. Others, such as health treatment based on need, not ability to pay, are yet to be won.
We underestimate, too, the extent to which the electoral success of my own party, in particular, dragged Irish politics from the centre-right to the centre-left. The Progressive Democrats, for instance, established in a blaze of glory to take all things public out of politics, now find themselves supporting the implementation of a minimum wage.
Yet some of Fintan O'Toole's criticism of the left does ring true. The arrogance of Edith Cresson and the paternalism of the old left are traits I recognise and reject. Socialists, in their haste to provide some services to people, often forgot one crucial part of that process, people themselves. Accordingly, we have moved from a position of rejecting markets that perform the task well to a position of regulating against their worst excesses.
In other areas, though, modern thinking, far from deserting the left, is returning to some of its key values. Spending by the State, for instance, so long anathema to many in this country that has seen State spending as a percentage of national product fall to the lowest in the European Union, is making an intellectual comeback.
Fintan O'Toole is right also in saying that the battle between ideals and pragmatism is more pronounced on the left than in any other political movement. And he is probably right to suggest that Oskar Lafontaine's total abandonment of one for the other led to his own downfall.
But the public is entitled to expect competence as well as principles from its politicians. In Mr Lafontaine's case, many of his ideas were not as radical as his confrontational manner in presenting them, but he ultimately paid the price for flouting the nature of the mandate given to his party at the election.
I reject Fintan's assertion that the left has spent so much time trimming its sails to the prevailing winds that it no longer knows what voyage it's on. Rather, the assertion by your European Correspondent, Patrick Smyth, that the phenomenon of globalisation has yet to find an adequate response from the left is closer to the truth. Put simply, socialism in one country clearly failed, and in the modern world there is no future for social democracy in one country either.
I do not take the view that globalisation per se is a bad thing. Yet it's clearly the new battleground between right and left and one in which the left has ceded too much ground. For example, while the right talks about the importance of free trade, often regardless of the democratic conditions in which it operates, to argue for the freedom of workers to trade their labour as they see fit in a functioning democracy is presented as a gross interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state.
If the right wants to argue for global economic rights let them, but the left's job will be to argue for a framework for human rights and democratic accountability rights, and not as an optional extra.
These are issues that the parties of the Party of European Socialists are already grappling with. It is no accident that an international debate on debt relief for the developing world should coincide with the ascendancy of the left in Europe. No accident either that it was the left which led the demand for the inclusion of chapters in the Amsterdam Treaty on employment and social exclusion.
My own party recently led opposition in the Dail to the Bretton Woods Bill and the ESAF fund. We have sponsored a bill on trade union recognition, with an approach which has been effectively endorsed by the high-level working group. The challenge of securing further democratisation of the European Union's institutions lies ahead.
