Third Way

Origins

The concept of a middle way that has inherent in it some form of moderation, and which fearlessly adapts the best parts of either extreme while eschewing the undesirable parts, has been common and popular throughout history. Aristotle, Queen Elizabeth I, and the Lord Buddha are among those who have called for a middle path. The idea seems plainly attractive.

So many incidences of binary structures—that is, ideological alternatives—are presented as representing sterile opposition that it is only through fusing the two that any progress could be made. Both G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx followed this methodology. It is easy, therefore, to cast such a debate in terms of right and left, public and private, and globalization versus antiglobalization and fashion from these oppositions a synthesis. By claiming that the Third Way represented an evolution of the left to cope with a modern world, which the right refuses to manage, proponents have used it to claim the whole of society as their natural constituency.

The second stage of Tony Blair's project, after all, after modernizing the Labour Party, was to unite it with the Liberal Democrats in a system of proportional representation that, dressed in the clothes of the center left but speaking the language of the populist right, would appeal to such a majority of the electorate that it would hardly ever be threatened. The alliance and electoral reform of this second phase may have been avoided, but the ability to speak in one way while doing another was lacking.

The benefits of the minimum wage, tax credits to lift thousands of the poorest out of poverty and provision of childcare and assistance to single-parent families have been almost completely ignored in election campaigns, which have been fought on grounds of crime and economic competence long regarded as the province of the right. Faced with criticism of the Third Way, nearly all of which comes from the left, Giddens has been unable to come up with convincing rejoinders restating the genuine substance of the system.

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