No French government except Léon Blum’s short-lived Popular Front of 1936 paid serious attention to the grievous mis-rule practiced by colonial admin… - Tony Judt

Eurocommunism was thus a contradiction in terms, despite the best efforts of its spokesmen.

The greatest beneficiaries of the modern welfare state, after all, were the middle classes.

Even in Scandinavia, where social democratic institutions were far more culturally ingrained, membership of the EU—or even just participation in the World Trade Organization and other international agencies—appeared to constrain locally-initiated legislation. In short, social democracy seemed doomed by that same internationalization which its early theorists had so enthusiastically adumbrated as the future of capitalism.
From this perspective, social democracy—like liberalism—was a byproduct of the rise of the European nation-state: a political idea keyed to the social challenges of industrialization in developed societies. Not only was there no ‘socialism’ in America, but social democracy as a working compromise between radical goals and liberal traditions lacked widespread support in any other continent. There was no shortage of enthusiasm for revolutionary socialism in much of the non-Western world, but the distinctively European compromise did not export well.