Introduction — Exceptionalism in Comparative Labour History

This book is a study of political change and the emergence of a working-class political movement in two naval dockyard towns, Plymouth in Britain and Karlskrona in Sweden. Naval dockyard towns, where a large proportion of the adult male population was employed in the direct service of the state, and where the early twentieth century agitation for 'big navy' politics seemed to have a particular resonance, have often been thought of as difficult territory for the labour movement, and for that reason have been largely ignored by labour historians. One of the main concerns of the study, therefore, is to explore the politics of naval defence in the local context, and the particular challenges which this presented to the emergent labour movement. Through a detailed exploration of the conditions of dockyard work, of everyday life and municipal politics at the local level, I hope to show that the politics of the dockyard town in were in fact far more complex and interesting than they are sometimes assumed to be.

The study has a wider ambition though, and that is to investigate a broad comparative question, namely, why did social democratic labour parties emerge in most European countries during the late nineteenth century? A major problem of cross-national comparison is that the historian is usually required to make huge generalisations, thus ignoring the internal variations and complexities of a particular case and presenting it in monolithic, over-simplified terms. The preferred methods of many labour historians–local and microscopic–do not seem to lend themselves readily to international comparisons, especially where such comparisons have a tendency to over-exaggerate the differences between states and nations at the expense of equally important variations at local or regional level. One of the aims of the present study is to demonstrate that cross-national comparisons are indeed compatible with local studies. It is argued that to be successful, cross-national comparisons have to be based on a more pluralist understanding of the complex processes and regional patterns and variations which make up a national case. In recent years there have been a number of calls for international comparative histories which move beyond the nation state, but, as yet, not more than a handful of studies which has actually done this. Moreover, much comparative labour history continues to be informed by the influential thesis of exceptionalism, in particular the assumption that Britain was fundamentally different to the 'continental' labour parties. The difficulties with this approach are explored in the first two chapters of the book, comparing the British case with Sweden. One of the advantages of a cross-national comparative study is that it requires the historian to develop a familiarity with two separate historiographical traditions, thus exposing sometimes long-held assumptions to new questions and approaches.

I

The British labour movement has been described as "the most anomalous left in Europe". Scholars have consistently regarded the British left as fundamentally different from its continental counterparts, exceptional in its historical development. The thesis of British exceptionalism has deep historical roots. Egon Wertheimer, observing the British labour movement at first hand during the 1920s, noted the 'wide difference' between the Labour Party and the socialist movement in his native Germany. Continental socialist parties were dogmatic and disciplined, homogenous and uniform in spirit, structure, organisation, vocabulary and leadership. In contrast,

How different is the Labour Party! Without a past that sets it in opposition to State and society, it reflects the national characteristics of the English people, undeterred and untroubled by the other Labour parties of the world. It is more British than German social democracy is German, Polish Socialism Polish.

Two characteristics in particular seemed to set the British Labour Party apart from the rest of Europe: the limited influence of socialism and the party's organisational structure, especially its relationship with the trade unions. Following the defeat of Chartism in the mid-nineteenth century, so the argument went, the British working class had turned its back on revolutionary politics, embracing instead 'purely economic' trade union action to defend their interests. Rather than being united by class consciousness, British working-class politics was fragmented and sectional, steered by the pragmatism of the trade unions, and the alliance between labour interests and radical Liberalism. The failure of Marxism to make more of an impact on the British working class could be explained by a number of anomalies within British social and political development: the social and geographical fragmentation of the working class; the apolitical nature of working-class associational culture in Britain; the extent to which the working class was integrated into existing political arrangements; and the lack of intellectual ideological leaders in the British labour movement. For these reasons, class loyalty and cohesiveness, not socialist doctrine, became the unifying principle of the Labour Party. As one influential historian of the party suggested,

One of the most highly class-conscious working-classes in the world produced a Party whose appeal was specifically intended to be classless. Accepting the Labour Party meant accepting not socialism but an intricate network of loyalties ... This was a trade-union code of behaviour; so were the political aims of the Labour Party essentially trade-union ones.

The exceptionalism of the British labour movement has to be seen within a wider tradition of historical writing which has set Britain's historical development apart from that of the rest of Europe, especially in its constitutional development. This tradition pervades even the most critical accounts of national history. For Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, the failure of the English working class to develop a revolutionary consciousness was attributed not so much to the specific conditions generated by late nineteenth century political and social developments, but to the 'cumulative fundamental moments of modern English history.' The 'least pure' bourgeois revolution in Europe resulted in the emergence of a...