Third way politics today

Steven Bastow

James Martin

pp. 211-230

in: David R. Howarth, Jacob Torfing (eds), Discourse theory in European politics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstract

The Third Way" has come to symbolize the effort to revive European social democratic politics at the start of the twenty-first century. Having rejected old-style socialist statism and the free-market economics of the New Right, leading social democrats claim to have identified an alternative that cuts a path between state and market. Two of the major parties of the left in Europe — the British Labour Party under Tony Blair and the German Social Democrats under Gerhard Schröder — have heralded a Third Way or, in German, a "new middle" (Neue Mitte), an ideology of the "radical centre" (see Blair, 1998, 2001; Blair and Schröder, 1999). Instead of a confrontational leftism, doomed forever to protest and never govern, proponents of the Third Way have announced a politics that purports to move beyond the antagonism between left and right.