The conventional wisdom after 1989 was that socialism was finished. Communist parties were ejected from power across eastern Europe, west European social democratic parties embraced neo-liberalism, and intellectuals wrote of the definitive victory of capitalism and even of the “end of history’ . A decade or so later things look rather different: the most serious crisis in the world economy since the Second World War has occurred; the experiment of free market economics in Russia has resulted in economic collapse; communist parties and their successors have gained significant electoral support in the former Soviet Union and most of eastern Europe; as in western Europe, social democracy has started to face a growing electoral challenge from a new European left - regaining and expanding a political space occupied previously by communist parties. This book argues that no analysis of the pattern of European politics, into the new millennium, can be complete without taking this developing force into account.