As Seth Ackerman’s 2012 essay “Europe Against the Left” put it, the default mode of left politics in Europe in the past four decades has been a narrowing of political horizons. “This path has led from François Mitterrand’s 1972 Common Program, with its exuberant call to ‘changer la vie’ via a ‘rupture’ with capitalism, to his ‘U-turn’ into austerity a decade later, to his helpless plaint a decade after that, when pressed on France’s endless mass unemployment, that ‘we tried everything.’ ”

On Monday 11/25, Jacobin and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung hosted a conversation between distinguished scholar of social democracy Sheri Berman, New York University’s Adaner Usmani, and Petter Nilsson from Sweden’s Vänsterpartiet (Left Party) on the future of social democracy in Europe and beyond.