“This thing” is what is commonly known as the Third Way, although hardly anyone uses the term in polite conversation anymore. The catch phrase has fallen into such disfavor that it was pointedly dropped from the official title of the informal summit in Florence two weekends ago. The Third Way has launched a thousand conferences, books, think tanks and, yes, magazine articles. But nobody agrees on what, if anything, it means. It has no “Das Kapital,” nor any party platform to light the way. It’s a process, an ongoing conversation among politicians, political strategists and political theorists about governing along a centrist course between the old and mostly discarded ideologies of left and right. In policy terms, it means finding a navigable channel between all-out Thatcherism and old-style socialism. In practical terms–often overlooked, they are in fact the ones that politicians really care about–the Third Way means finding a way of staying in power.
The heads of government who met in Florence were elected because they seemed to know the way ahead. That does not make them ideological sextuplets. These leaders–along with their counterparts in other center-left governments around the world–run countries with very different political traditions and problems. President Fernando Cardoso’s problems in a relatively poor, developing country like Brazil bear little resemblance to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s, much less those of a less populous, affluent society like Sweden. “The Third Way is mainly a discussion between Blair and Clinton,” Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson told me recently.
Yet even Bill Clinton and Tony Blair cannot use the same template. They get along famously. They and their wives spent two hours together after the Saturday dinner in Florence. But while they are among the few who dare to utter the words “third way,” Blair would never–could never–go as far as Clinton has gone in removing safety nets for the unemployed and the disadvantaged. In the same way, Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin cannot crack the whip with their trade unions the way Clinton and Blair can.
Even within the European Union, models for governance don’t move as freely across borders as goods and people do. Blair used the get-together in Florence to lobby Schroder for hands-off treatment of the attempted hostile takeover of the German telecommunications giant Mannesmann by the British company Vodafone. Schroder backed the reluctant Mannesmann, saying the 79 billion bid–it would be the world’s largest hostile takeover–would destroy the “culture” of the German firm.
That was just one example from the summit of the clash between globalization and nationalism. There is mounting criticism of Third Way “solutions” that are promoted as global prescriptions. Blair did not help matters by acting, in the early days after his Labour Party’s big 1997 victory following 18 years of Conservative rule, “as if he had invented the wheel,” as one prominent British Third Way networker said to me. His New Labour hubris did not sit well with the history-drenched socialist parties on the Continent. So it was hardly a surprise in Florence when Jospin, after somewhat acidly pointing out that his government had created more jobs (800,000) than Blair’s (700,000), went on to say, in diplomatic French that doesn’t translate very well: “I don’t believe in the model that one is trying to impose on me.” On the street, the same sentiment might be expressed by an obscene gesture.
This sort of ideological arm-wrestling goes with the territory. Where there is much more “commonality of purpose,” to use the think-tank argot, is on the electoral front. Everyone shares one objective: the need to get re-elected. This is at the center of Al From’s concern–how does the center-left, having usurped policies initiated by the Reagan-Thatcher right, make sure the now center-right doesn’t usurp them back again? A year ago, the center-left bestrode Europe like Colossus: out of 15 European Union member countries, only Spain and Ireland were in the hands of center-right parties. Since then, outbursts of nationalism, combined with concern over globalization and European integration, have chipped away at the center-left’s hold. The result: electoral defeats, most of them local, in the European Parliament, Belgium, Austria and Germany.
Among the center-left parties represented in Florence, only Blair’s Labour Party is in an unassailable electoral position. Clinton the New Democrat is entering his last year in office, and a Republican future is baying at the gates. Schroder is on the verge of further bad news in regional elections. D’Alema has to deal with coalition troubles on his left. Jospin has his own left-wing coalition to contend with–and a right-wing president. In Brazil, Cardoso is dogged by scandal, high unemployment and urban crime. That tally alone ensures that Third Way summits, by whatever anodyne name, will remain on the calendar. For wherever policy wonks go, pollsters and political strategists are sure to follow. Next stop: Berlin, 2000.
