Socialist International

Formation and lineage

Socialist International (SI) is an international organization rebuilt after the Second World War. It took its present form at its First Congress, held in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, from 30 June to 3 July 1951, where the declaration "Aims and Tasks of Democratic Socialism" was adopted; this text is known as the Frankfurt Declaration.

Its lineage reaches back to the late nineteenth century. The Second International was formed in Paris on 14 July 1889; the Berne International (International Socialist Commission) followed in February 1919 and the Vienna International (IWUSP) on 27 February 1921. These merged in Hamburg in May 1923 into the Labour and Socialist International (LSI), which was active from 1923 to 1940 and is the forerunner of today's SI.

The LSI competed with the Communist International for leadership of the international socialist and labour movement, but unlike the Comintern it was a federation of autonomous national parties and exercised no direct control over its sections. That practice carried over into the SI, which has traditionally been a federation of fully independent and autonomous parties with no preconditions for admission and no binding policy program.

Organization and activity

The supreme decision-making bodies are the Congress, held every four years, and the Council, which includes all member parties and meets twice a year; the secretariat is in London. The SI holds Category I consultative status with the United Nations and maintains close ties with fraternal organizations such as the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY), Socialist International Women (SIW) and the International Foundation for Labour and Social Studies (IFM/SEI).

Congress venues run from Frankfurt (1951) through Milan (1952), Stockholm (1953), London (1955), Vienna (1957), Hamburg (1959), Rome (1961) and Amsterdam (1963) to later cities and Madrid (2022). The XVIII Congress in Stockholm in June 1989 adopted a Declaration of Principles that updated the Frankfurt Declaration. Past presidents include Morgan Phillips (1951–1957), A. Andersen (1957–1962), Erich Ollenhauer (1963), Bruno Pittermann (1964–1976), Willy Brandt (1976–1992), Pierre Mauroy (1992–1999), António Guterres (1999–2005), George Papandreou (2005–2022) and Pedro Sánchez (2022–).

Cold War line and Latin America

The founding texts of 1951 condemned capitalism for placing "the rights of ownership before the rights of man" and for imperialist expansion and colonial exploitation. At the same time they declared that socialism could only be achieved through democracy and rejected rigid uniformity of approach. Toward communism they took a sharply opposed stance, asserting that "International Communism is the instrument of a new imperialism" and sought the dictatorship of a single party, and treating the right of more than one party to exist as a condition of democracy. They simultaneously rejected every form of imperialism and colonialism while holding a merely negative anti-imperialism to be insufficient and demanding redistribution of world wealth.

In the early post-war decades the SI aided social democratic parties re-establishing themselves as dictatorship gave way to democracy in Portugal (1974) and Spain (1975). Until its 1976 Geneva Congress, however, it had few members outside Europe and no formal involvement with Latin America. Korean-language sources characterize this period as a pro-Western line supportive of US and British capitalism, and critically note that the SI did not denounce the 1954 coup against Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala or the 1965 US invasion of the Dominican Republic. These assessments are interpretations belonging to particular texts and should be read as attributed views.

The 1973 coup in Chile marked a turn. Under François Mitterrand's leadership the SI then supported the Nicaraguan Sandinistas (FSLN) and movements in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and in the 1980s most SI parties backed the Sandinistas. In the late 1970s and 1980s the SI had extensive contacts with the United States and the Soviet Union on East–West relations and arms control, supporting détente and SALT II, START and INF.

Programmatic shift and departures

By the 1980s the SI had become more favourable to a social market economy than to a socialist economy, arguing that markets can promote innovation and signal consumer desires. In the 1990s it was joined by a growing number of non-socialist parties and was described as working "in a clientist way", admitting centrist parties such as Argentina's UCR, Mexico's PRI and the Colombian Liberal Party; many left parties of the Pink Tide preferred to keep their distance.

Departures on the left also accumulated. The Socialist Party of Uruguay and the Democratic Socialists of America left the SI in 2017 over member parties adopting austerity, privatisation, deregulation and capitalism. The former helped found the Progressive Alliance (2013), and the latter joined the Progressive International in 2023.

The Progressive Alliance split itself began in January 2012, when SPD chair Sigmar Gabriel cancelled the SPD's £100,000 yearly SI membership fee, criticising the SI's admission and continuing inclusion of undemocratic political movements; the PA was founded on 22 May 2013 in Leipzig as an alternative to the SI.

The Tunisian Constitutional Democratic Rally and the Egyptian National Democratic Party were expelled in January 2011, and the Ivorian Popular Front in March 2011, under the statutes, with the expulsions approved at the Cape Town Congress in 2012. In March 2022 A Just Russia was expelled for supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Korean-language sources state that in the mid-1980s the SI reverted to its pro-Western, pro-capitalist line, and that in the 1990s third-way popularity led to frequent accession of centre-right parties. The same sources recount that Latin American social democrats opposed to US imperialism left the SI and joined the founding of the São Paulo Forum, and that the 2019 Algerian protests led to the expulsion of the National Liberation Front.

Distinctions and symbols

The contrast with the Comintern lies in organizational principle: where the Comintern was a centralised body with binding program and leadership, the LSI and SI tradition is a federation of fully independent and autonomous parties. Korean-language accounts also record the assessment that the 1951 declaration denounced Soviet Marxism-Leninism and Stalinism and the Cominform while expressing support for US and British capitalism and a pro-Western policy.

Within social democracy there are further distinctions. The 1951 declaration set democratic socialism against both capitalist planning and "every form of totalitarian planning", while allowing public ownership to take varied forms such as nationalisation, municipal and regional enterprise and cooperatives, and permitting private ownership in agriculture, handicraft, retail and small and medium industry.

As a cultural symbol, the SI's logo is the fist and rose, based on the 1977 design by José María Cruz Novillo for the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, itself a variant of the emblem drawn by Marc Bonnet for the French Socialist Party in 1969.

The 1951 declaration called for abolishing all legal, economic and political discrimination between the sexes, social groups, town and countryside, and regional and racial groups, and listed rights to work, medical and maternity benefits, leisure, economic security, children's welfare and adequate housing.