first review www.theglobalsite.ac.uk 2001

Will Leggett

Even technocrats need values ...

Anthony Giddens, editor, The Global Third Way Debate, Oxford: Polity, 2001. 448 pages, 0-7456-2741-2 hardback £50.00 / 0-7456-2742-0 paperback £16.99

Will Leggett is researching a D.Phil. on Third Way theory and politics and teaches politics and sociology at the University of Sussex, UK. w.p.leggett@sussex.ac.uk

This edited collection is the latest of Anthony Giddens’ attempts to develop a philosophy and programme for Third Way politics. (1) The original choice of the term ‘Third Way’ was unfortunate. At its worst, reflected in parts of this volume, it involves finding any two binary straw-men, proposing a solution that appears to avoid the pitfalls of both, and using this to jump on a ‘Third Way’ bandwagon while the term remains fashionable. However, in his comprehensive introduction, Giddens rightly claims that whatever label is actually adopted, the Third Way now represents an established body of ideas evident in the emerging programmes of centre-left governments. The stated aim of this collection is to move beyond debates about what the Third Way ‘is’ and provide a flavour of the various attempts to flesh it out in practice. (2)

The four sections of the book contain extracts on the variety of Third Ways, social policy, government and economic power and global prospects, with contributions from both academics and policy makers. Together they provide a useful source for those following the trajectory of the centre-left. However, there is the nagging sense that the question of what the Third Way is, its political character, has been discarded too hastily.

As with all edited collections, the disparate nature of the contributions can be problematic. This is not a book to be read from cover to cover. The introductory remarks to each major section are cursory, leaving it up to the diligent reader to pick out common themes and contrasts. The by now familiar themes of Third Way advocates are prevalent throughout. The facts of economic globalization, the rise of the knowledge economy and the need for welfare restructuring are taken as given at every stage. The importance of strong civic institutions, the building of social capital and the matching of ‘rights with responsibilities’ are also recurrent themes. In places the New Labour, new management-speak now associated with these concepts induces a certain glaze. For example, we are told of the need for;

a political economy focused around the promotion of effective social relationships as the critical accelerator of information around the economy, thereby enhancing the value of human capital investment (3)

Fortunately, the joy of short edited extracts is that such babbling never need be endured to breaking point.

Underpinning the various contributions, a struggle is being played out. This concerns the extent to which the Third Way is simply a rational response to the kinds of macro sociological changes identified by Giddens and others, or an attempt to steer these processes from firmly within the (albeit modernized) values of social democracy. Clearly, both of these approaches tend to exist side by side, but it is the former, technocratic element that dominates. A number of the contributors seem to believe they are presenting their policy proposals from the standpoint of ‘the end of history’, that Third Way practitioners are working from a clean slate in a world in which conflicts, ideological divisions and unequal power relations are a thing of the past. The task is simply to reveal how it is possible to have, ‘a win-win future where economic efficiency does not have to be traded off against long-term economic interests’. (4)

For example, appeals are frequently made to business to accept centre-left proposals on the grounds of efficiency. Kapstein points out, apparently in all earnestness, that with regard to the developing world, ‘it is hard to develop an economy when large numbers of workers are dying in what should be the prime of life’. (5) He suggests that this observation should be used to highlight the value of universal healthcare. Similarly, environmental degradation should be avoided as those whose health it destroys are ‘less capable of realizing their talents. The result is a waste of human resources’. (6)

This approach is rooted in the belief that we have reached an end-game state of historical development in which economic self-interest and the pursuit of public goods are as one: the ‘win-win’ situation described above. Such thinking rather smacks of the historical determinism that Third Way thinkers associate with the ‘old left’ and claim to have moved beyond. Otherwise, if Third Way advocates recognise the provisional and contingent character of history, then they must perceive that the alleged coincidence of business interests with progressive reforms is also contingent. In rougher economic times, what happens when the business assessment becomes that efficiency is in fact best served through other means, such as downsizing, minimizing investment and calling for cuts in public expenditure? Progressive measures are then likely to be discarded along with the life-chances of those they sought to protect.

Whilst showing how the Third Way can benefit business is undoubtedly a useful and necessary tactic, in the long term the stating and winning of an intellectually and morally compelling argument for centre-left values cannot be avoided. This is the only chance of challenging the monopoly of common sense achieved in the golden era of the neoliberal right.

It is this spectre of neoliberal hegemony that spurs on many critics of the Third Way. They suggest it is merely an attempt to give a human face to a neoliberal project which has already run away with the spoils of ideological battle. As Michael Allen’s contribution notes;

The emergence of the Third Way coincided not only with the political and ideological triumph of capital, but with the hegemony of a particular concept of the capitalist enterprise. Within Anglo-American firms at least, the maximisation of shareholder value determines management practice and is held to constrain policy options. (7)

If only some of the more enthusiastic contributors to this collection were similarly reflexive about the historical emergence of the Third Way discourse itself. However, there are nevertheless some encouraging signs that the ‘there is no alternative’ version of Third Way proselytising is open to challenge at the level of political strategy, and that ideological conflict is in fact far from over. In contrast to the technocratic fatalism identified earlier, the best work in this vein acknowledges the importance of the socio-economic shifts that have occurred, but can envisage a more progressive future for them. Such a future is grounded in social democratic values, which are not redundant. Thus, Driver and Martell highlight the range of value-positions that can be associated with the Third Way, and how they are contested.(8) As Director of the Fabian Society, Michael Jacobs suggests in an extract from his recent pamphlet on environmental modernization;

In fact the future is always open. Yes, there are powerful forces, some of them almost certainly too strong to turn back. But this does not mean that the currents can only flow down a single channel. They can be steered in different directions, given different forms, prevented from having certain effects, pushed into having others. Political action is therefore not about halting the present order, nor wishing to reverse it, but of finding limits to its possible forms. (9)

This collection is at its most progressive where such an approach is adopted. Significantly, in his introduction, Giddens, who has done more than anyone to map the ‘powerful forces’ that underpin the need for a Third Way (eg globalization, individualization), stresses the components that should make a Third Way response distinctly social democratic. This suggests that charges that Giddens is little more than a New Labour mouthpiece are unfounded. Thus, he emphasises that Left and Right have not disappeared, and that Left values of equality and protecting the vulnerable are central to the Third Way. To this end he stresses the ongoing importance of redistributive measures. He also argues that debates about exclusion and matching rights with responsibilities must expand to focus on tackling the self-imposed exclusion of elites and the responsibilities of the corporate sector. (10)

This opens up an agenda, developed elsewhere in the book, concerning the strategies centre-left governments can adopt to regulate against the more corrosive effects of globalized capitalism. The most developed advocacy of how to achieve this at the level of greater democratization is found in the work of David Held, which is usefully summarised in one of the later extracts. (11) In the same vein, Allen’s contribution on the potential relationship of the Third Way to business re-opens the stakeholding agenda. On this view, attempts to simply persuade business that it is in its best interests to pursue more ‘socially friendly’ strategies is by itself insufficient, given its lamentable record to date. The Third Way needs to recognise that there are times when business interests need to be challenged in ways, ‘which are likely to offend corporate sensibilities, question managerial prerogatives and constrain or temper market mechanisms’. (12)

The central tension in this collection, then, is between a fatalistic, de facto capitulation to neoliberal doctrines that masquerades as pragmatism of the ‘what counts is what works’ variety, and a more active strategy, grounded in social democratic values, that seeks to both engage with significant socio-economic shifts and steer them in a more progressive direction. In the first part of his Third Way trilogy, Giddens suggested that at present;

theory lags behind practice. Bereft of the old certainties, governments claiming to represent the left are creating policy on the hoof. Theoretical flesh needs to be put on the skeleton of their policy-making - not just to endorse what they are doing, but to provide politics with a greater sense of direction and purpose. (13)

To date, Giddens himself has made a plausible, if greatly contested, attempt to this end. However, much of the Global Third Way Debate appears to invert this process, returning to ‘on the hoof’ policy-making in the absence of theoretical elaboration. It may be that, as Giddens implies, the body of ideas that goes under the label ‘Third Way’ is now well enough established so as no longer to concern itself with what it fundamentally is. Thus, Third Way elites are able to proceed in technocratic fashion with their ‘evidence-led’ policy making, free from such old-fashioned distractions as normative and ideological conflicts.

This scenario must be resisted in theory and in practice. Giddens is undoubtedly right to seek to flesh out a substantive Third Way policy agenda, and this collection provides a useful overview of the policy themes that have been emerging. However, the theoretical and normative debate concerning the political basis and character of the Third Way is not over, and nor should it be as long as it makes claims to be the governing ideology of the centre-left. Third Way policy work needs to be assessed in terms of how it reflects and elucidates a wider ideological project. On this basis we can retain the awareness that the Third Way, like its predecessors, is not the only way. History is alive and well.

Notes