The penny finally dropped on a sunny day in late October in the stunning Austrian resort of Poertschach. Seeing Europe's new leadership leaders gathered for an informal summit, it dawned that we really were in a new era: out had gone Helmut Kohl, and in has come Gerhard Schroder; out Romano Prodi, and in erstwhile communist Massimo D'Alema.
Thirteen of the EU governments now contained socialists. Eleven were actually led by socialists, a prospect barely conceivable a decade ago when Thatcherism and Reaganism proclaimed the death of socialism and even the end of history.
Already in Poertschach the shift was being felt. Jobs and interest rates held centre stage as chief preoccupations while fears of inflation were pushed into the background.
The difference was subtle. Maastricht's economic disciplines remain the order of the day. But there was a sense, for the first time in years, that Europe's leaders thought they could do more for employment than tinker with the supply side of the economy to ensure trained and flexible workers when the market demanded them.
Yet what exactly was - is - the socialist project? Are their critics from the further left and right correct in insisting that Tony Blair and New Labour's so-called Third Way, or Gerhard Shroeder's Neue Mitte (new centre) are merely brilliant advertising slogans devoid of content?
We knew what they were against. The election of left-of-centre governments throughout Europe, and of Bill Clinton in the US, represented an historic rejection of a particularly uncaring form of capitalism. It was a break with Margaret Thatcher's rejection of the notion of society in favour of a project wrapped in the packaging of community.
Importantly, both Blair and D'Alema are also flying the flag of democratic reform, the former in his commitment to the most far-reaching transformation of the British constitution this century through devolution, electoral reform, and the neutering of the House of Lords. The latter is working to reform an electoral system that nourished corruption.
But in recapturing the middle ground of politics these New Socialists were also to take on board many of the political icons of the right - family, law and order, welfare reform, and the notion that individual freedom must go hand in hand with personal responsibility.
And these are no spendthrift Keynesians. Travelling through Europe this year from Copenhagen, to Stockholm, Oslo, and even Warsaw, one was struck by the extent to which, everywhere, the socialists have been the preachers of economic orthodoxy, warning against the fiscal profligacy of their conservative or centrist opponents.
Indeed, some, like the US journalist William Pfaff, see Europe's new socialist leadership in an explicitly un-ideological context.
He cites the verdict of a French rightwing commentator, Jean d'Ormesson, in Le Figaro on the pragmatic successes of Jospin's first year: "Must we all become socialists?" His answer is Yes, because the mildly reforming socialists have outshone their conservative predecessors in terms of competence at managing the system.
Pfaff argues that this does not reflect the intellectual victory of the right over the ideas of the left. On the contrary.
"It is evidence," he says, "that the left has conquered the right. For all practical purposes, the liberal or social democratic left has won the intellectual and political battles of the last two centuries, making the modern world what it is, and it is now preoccupied with the practical problems of managing the result."
The twin key battles of the labour movement to establish democratic rights and a welfare safety net have been won.
What is left, he argues, are mere technicalities: how to finance a welfare state in the context of an ageing population; how to manage a single currency. how to manage the fall-out from the crisis in Asia and Russia. "These are technical problems, practical problems of administrations and budgets. They are no easier to solve for that, but they have nothing to do with principles."
To an extent he may be right, if only at a national level. Yet he ignores one giant phenomenon of no small importance - globalisation. The globalisation of politics has followed that of the world economy and changed for ever the paradigms of the ideological debate within the socialist movement, but it has far from done away with it.
Europe's new leadership takes office after a long period of intense soul-searching for socialists - the problem is how to respond to the new reality that turnover on foreign exchanges now tops one trillion dollars a day and some 20,000 multinationals now account for a third of world output and 70 per cent of trade.
The total opening up of trade and particularly the movement of capital has made academic the old domestic spending arguments. Countries which run high deficits are simply crucified by the markets.
For some this has meant simply accepting the logic of international capitalism - the way of the world, Tony Blair has described it - and confining the socialist agenda to the crumbs off the table.
For others there is a need for a new, but now global, agenda, what Ruairi Quinn calls the socialisation of the global economy. "The left has got to lead the argument that the global economy is dependent for its consolidation on recognising both the legitimacy and the necessity of the social democratic agenda," he told a recent Socialist conference.
That ranges from reforming the International Monetary Fund and the international financial institutions to create a new Bretton Woods-type order, to using the World Trade Organisation to enhance labour standards, or to creating an international court of justice to try the likes of Pinochet.
That is also the thesis of the new bete noire of the European right-wing press, German Finance Minister, Oskar Lafontaine, whose book, Don't worry about Globalisation, argues for "international co-operation instead of a race to the bottom." But he has yet to convince his Chancellor Schroder.
To date the left's debate on this great challenge is unfocused - very much a work in progress. There are no clear ideological camps yet, only a spectrum from the passivism of those who say nothing can be done to buck the markets, to the activism of interventionist believers in world governance.
The truth is that the significance of the left's revival in Europe, lies not so much in its closing of the Thatcher years, but in the ushering in of a new era of global politics.
Watch this space.