Hi Antipodean
whereas i value very much your contributions to this forum and in general i share most of your views, I fundamentally disagree with this one.
The overall basic fundament of almost all European states is open market capitalism by nature. In Germany for example there is a broad consensus between Social Democrats, right centered CDU (and also the Greens and certainly FDP) that the basic postwar model is and should be “Soziale Marktwirtschaft” (which could be translated as social market economy). And this applies for many countries, certainly towards the north of the continent. Then you have quite a few open market skeptical countries such as France. But as members of the European Union they are also effectively forced into this open market ‘corset’.
Now whether you have you left wing governments in power (social democrats or Greens), this doesnt change basically anything regarding the fundamental economic model. Obviously they are pushing for more state influence (social security etc) which often goes along with higher taxes.
Of course neither ‘pure’ capitalism nor ‘pure’ socialism exist. The latter in its core means that there is a central planning body which is ‘taking care‘ of the individuals. A capitalist, open market model puts the individuals at the centre and let them interact and trade within the boundaries of the law freely. What happened over the last 100+ years (or basically since the industrialization) is that there were more and more ‘social components’ added to this model (pension, social security, workers rights etc). But the fundamental principle was not really affected.
Regarding the Social Democrats: they were founded as a result of worker‘s movements (close to trade unions). Some of them were at the beginning of the Russian Revolution ideologically quite quite close to communism (even saw this as the ultimate goal), over the years and decades almost all of them abandoned the idea of socialism in the meaning of implementing a plan economy. So social democrats has nowadays not much to do with socialism, certainly not in Europe.
If you also look at the European states which rank in the top 10 of the most competitive countries (
WEF) [NL, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark], they all have significant Social Democrat parties, which are in government or were there over the last decades partially. And if they were socialist at its core, these countries certainly wouldnt rank in the top 10 in this index.