The Third Way: the Renewal of Social Democracy - Giddens (1998) - According to Anthony Giddens, was the Third Way just neoliberalism in disguise?
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Third Way, Anthony Giddens, policymaking, social democracy, neoliberalism, globalisation
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Abstract
Faced to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the socialist bloc in the late 1980s on the one hand, and the advanced spread of the neoliberal discourse, on the other, European social democrat parties started a process of discussion which aimed to analyse realistically the global changes that the society, the economy and the very subjects had experienced in the last decades, and thus, aimed to recover the lost support of the electorate (Giddens, 1998). They tried to find a renovated discourse that, standing on the social democratic value's platform, would be able to offer a new framework of thinking and policymaking which would be 'beyond the Old Left and the New Right', that is, different from traditional social democracy and neoliberalism (Giddens, 1999). Their bet was to construct an alternative path or "Third Way". In the late 1990s, the new political proposal got the attention of all kind of policy-makers and academics, becoming highly referred and contested (Power and Whitty, 1999). Third Way-ism was on the table to such extent that it was chosen 'European of the year' in 1999 by Newsweek (Giddens, 1999). It appeared as a real and new alternative to follow or discuss, and so, at least electorally, it worked. In 1997, committed with that project of renewal, the English New Labour Party won the elections, and Tony Blair replaced Margaret Thatcher, the rightist Prime Minister that had ruled England for a period of 18 years.
Extract
[...] Third Way-ism was on the table to such extent that it was chosen 'European of the year' in 1999 by Newsweek (Giddens, 1999). It appeared as a real and new alternative to follow or discuss, and so, at least electorally, it worked. In 1997, committed with that project of renewal, the English New Labour Party won the elections, and Tony Blair replaced Margaret Thatcher, the rightist Prime Minister that had ruled England for a period of 18 years. Furthermore, other centre-leftist parties and politicians of the time reached power adhering to the trend - the Third Way spread to the U.S. [...]
[...] There is no automatic commitment to either the public sector or the private one. B. Managing the risk Within this process of modernisation, in order to maintain its legitimacy, the state has to be in charge of managing the risk, but not only that risk referred to security and economy, but also that related with technology, science and ecology, argues Giddens (1998). He states that managing the risk is also related with understanding the state as an 'investor', which involves having a key role cultivating human capital and the necessary infrastructure to 'develop a culture of entrepreneurship' (1998: 110). [...]
[...] The ecological issue is the fourth identified by Giddens. The interest of its development on the subject resides less in the revision of the problems posed by the control of the environment in the modification of the environment. He deduces that politics is less secure than the hazards of science and technology that helps to live in a "society of risks". Thus, the third way, introduced on the book, can be a way to understand how Emmanuel Macron ran and won the French presidential election in 2017. [...]
[...] The investor state seeks to prepare people to face the knowledge economy and the changes of technology and communication, thus education is given a predominant role (Driver and Martell, 2000). On the other hand, the program proposed by New Labour includes strategies to create an active and responsible civil society (not dependant on the state, and source of 'social capital'). 'In a decent society, individuals should not simply claim rights from the state but should also accept their individual responsibilities and duties as citizens, parents and members of communities' (Driver and Martell, 2000: 151). [...]
[...] The central theme here is an irreversible globalisation - a process which entails important economic changes, like the significant openness of the national markets and the increasing weight of the transnational financial markets (Giddens, 1998). Globalisation, however, is not only seen as economic interdependence, but as a change to the culture, to the lifestyles and to the family (Blair in Driver and Martell, 2000). It has to be handled 'positively', says Giddens (1998: whereas economic and cultural protectionism has to be rejected, since it is 'undesirable and senseless'. II. [...]
