Seminar Panelists Comment on Prospects, Problems of Socialism in Western Europe

A British Labourite said Wednesday night that European socialist parties should be able to produce a more humane, egalitarian and democratic solution to the problems of the modern world than the American Way of Life.

Giles Radice, head of the research department for Britain's General and Municipal Workers Union, told several hundred people in Emerson hall that the United Kingdom requires more redistribution of income and action on the social welfare front, but that the biggest problem concerns the nature of British democracy.

One of the five panelists at the International Seminar's open forum on European socialism, Radice said that society's decision-makers take decisions without reference to those who are affected by their decisions. This produces an alienation, regardless of who is in power, since the people feel they are on the receiving end of every decision, he said.

The Secretary of Italy's Center for International Affairs, Gerardo Mombelli, said that socialism now has more problems than solutions. But, he added, the initiative is now with the socialists, and if the initiative remains with them, and progress toward European unification continues, then Americans will realize there is something more in Europe than the Pope and De Gaulle.

Luc Huyse, a sociologist from Belgium and apparently the only non-socialist to participate in the panel, said the Belgian socialist party was plagued by the persistence of an out-dated anti-clericalinsm, and some anti-intellectualism.

Confusion in Europe's socialist movement, he said, has prevented success in two areas where ideology would have helped. He said that the socialists had failed to offer an alternative to the vision of a Europe of businessmen, and that they had failed to develop a notion of Europe's role in aiding the Third World.