The Third Way E-Book

Anthony Giddens

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 212

Beschreibung

The idea of finding a 'third way' in politics has been widely discussed over recent months - not only in the UK, but in the US, Continental Europe and Latin America. But what is The Third Way? Supporters of the notion haven't been able to agree, and critics deny the possibility altogether. Anthony Giddens shows that developing a third way is not only a possibility but a necessity in modern politics.

Leseprobe

Anthony Giddens

THE THIRD WAY

The Renewal of Social Democracy

Polity

Copyright © Anthony Giddens

The right of Anthony Giddens to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1998 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 1998 twice, 1999 three times, 2000 four times 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007,2008 (twice)

Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the british Library.

Libary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Giddens, Anthony.

The third way: the renewal of social democracy / Anthony Giddens.p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-7456-2266-8 (hbk) – ISBN 978-0-7456-2267-5 (pbk) – ISBN 978-0-7456-6660-0 (eBook)

1. Post-communism. 2. Socialism 3. Welfare state 4. Right and left (Political science)I. Title.

HX73.G55 1999

335-dc21

98—40806

CIP

Typeset in 11 on 14 pt Sabon by Wearset, Boldon, Tyne and Wear. Printed in Great Britain by T. J. International, Padstow, Cornwall

Contents

Preface

1Socialism and After

The death of socialism

Old-style social democracy

The neoliberal outlook

The doctrines compared

The recent debates

Structures of political support

The fate of social democracy

2Five Dilemmas

Globalization

Individualism

Left and right

Political agency

Ecological issues

Third way politics

3State and Civil Society

Democratizing democracy

The question of civil society

Crime and community

The democratic family

4The Social Investment State

The meaning of equality

Inclusion and exclusion

A society of positive welfare

Social investment strategies

5Into the Global Age

The cosmopolitan nation

Cultural pluralism

Cosmopolitan democracy

The European Union

Global governance

Market fundamentalism on a world scale

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Preface

I intend this short book as a contribution to the debate now going on in many countries about the future of social democratic politics. The reasons for the debate are obvious enough – the dissolution of the ‘welfare consensus’ that dominated in the industrial countries up to the late 1970s, the final discrediting of Marxism and the very profound social, economic and technological changes that helped bring these about. What should be done in response, and whether social democracy can survive at all as a distinctive political philosophy, are much less obvious.

I believe social democracy can not only survive, but prosper, on an ideological as well as a practical level. It can only do so, however, if social democrats are prepared to revise their pre-existing views more thoroughly than most have done so far. They need to find a third way. As I explain in the text, the term ‘third way’ is of no particular significance in and of itself. It has been used many times before in the past history of social democracy, and also by writers and politicians of quite different political persuasions. I make use of it here to refer to social democratic renewal – the present-day version of the periodic rethinking that social democrats have had to carry out quite often over the past century.

In Britain ‘third way’ has come to be associated with the politics of Tony Blair and New Labour. Tony Blair’s political beliefs have frequently been compared to those of the New Democrats in the US, and indeed there have been close and direct contacts between New Labour and the New Democrats. It has been said that ‘like the Thatcher and Major governments, the Blair government looks across the Atlantic for inspiration, not across the channel. Its rhetoric is American, the intellectual influences which have shaped its project are American; its political style is American.’1

The statement is not wholly true. Labour’s welfare to work programme, for instance, may have an American-style label, but arguably draws its inspiration more from Scandinavian active labour market programmes than from the US. In so far as the observation is valid, however, the emphasis is one that needs correcting. The debate around New Labour, lively and interesting though it is, has been carried on largely in ignorance of comparable discussions that have been going on in Continental social democracy for some while. Tony Blair’s break with old Labour was a significant accomplishment, but a similar sort of break has been made by virtually all Continental social democratic parties.

In many respects the debate in the UK needs to catch up with the more advanced sectors of Continental social democracy. Yet the UK is also in a position to contribute actively to the new ideas now emerging. Rather than merely appropriating American trends and notions, Britain could be a sparking point for creative interaction between the US and Continental Europe. Most countries on the Continent have not experienced lengthy periods of neoliberal government as the UK has. Whatever else Thatcherism may or may not have done, it certainly shook up British society. Margaret Thatcher, like most other neoliberals, was no ordinary conservative. Flying the flag of free markets, she attacked established institutions and elites, while her policies lent further force to changes already sweeping through the society at large. The Labour Party and its intellectual sympathizers first of all responded largely by reaffirming old left views. The electoral setbacks the party suffered by so doing, however, necessarily stimulated a new orientation. As a consequence, political discussion in the UK in some ways has been more free thinking than in social democratic circles on the Continent. Ideas developed in Britain could have direct relevance to the Continental debates, as these have mostly unfolded against a different backdrop.

This book grew out of a series of informal evening discussion meetings between myself, Ian Hargreaves and Geoff Mulgan, both of whom I would like to thank. Originally we were going to produce a collective document about the revival of social democracy. For various reasons this didn’t materialize, but I have drawn much inspiration from our meetings. I must especially thank David Held, who meticulously read several versions of the manuscript and whose comments were crucial for the restructuring of the text that I subsequently carried out. Among others who helped me a great deal are Martin Albrow, Ulrich Beck, Alison Cheevers, Miriam Clarke, Amanda Goodall, Fiona Graham, John Gray, Steve Hill, Julian Le Grand, David Miliband, Henrietta Moore and Anne Power. I owe a particular debt to Alena Ledeneva, who not only contributed extensively to the book as a whole but prompted me to continue whenever I became discouraged – which was quite often.

1

Socialism and After

In February 1998, following a policy seminar with the American leadership in Washington, Tony Blair spoke of his ambition to create an international consensus of the centre-left for the twenty-first century. The new approach would develop a policy framework to respond to change in the global order. ‘The old left resisted that change. The new right did not want to manage it. We have to manage that change to produce social solidarity and prosperity.’1 The task is a formidable one because, as these statements indicate, pre-existing political ideologies have lost their resonance.

A hundred and fifty years ago Marx wrote that ‘a spectre is haunting Europe’ – the spectre of socialism or communism. This remains true, but for different reasons from those Marx had in mind. Socialism and communism have passed away, yet they remain to haunt us. We cannot just put aside the values and ideals that drove them, for some remain intrinsic to the good life that it is the point of social and economic development to create. The challenge is to make these values count where the economic programme of socialism has become discredited.

Political ideas today seem to have lost their capacity to inspire and political leaders their ability to lead. Public debate is dominated by worries about declining moral standards, growing divisions between rich and poor, the stresses of the welfare state. The only groups which appear resolutely optimistic are those that place their faith in technology to resolve our problems. But technological change has mixed consequences, and in any case technology cannot provide a basis for an effective political programme. If political thinking is going to recapture its inspirational qualities, it has to be neither simply reactive nor confined to the everyday and the parochial. Political life is nothing without ideals, but ideals are empty if they don’t relate to real possibilities. We need to know both what sort of society we would like to create and the concrete means of moving towards it. This book seeks to show how these aims can be achieved and political idealism revived.

My main point of reference is Britain, although many of my arguments range more widely. In the UK, as in many other countries at the moment, 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. For the left, of course, has always been linked to socialism and, at least as a system of economic management, socialism is no more.

The death of socialism

The origins of socialism were tied up with the early development of industrial society, somewhere in the mid to late eighteenth century. The same is true of its principal opponent, conservatism, which was shaped in reaction to the French Revolution. Socialism began as a body of thought opposing individualism; its concern to develop a critique of capitalism only came later. Before it took on a very specific meaning with the rise of the Soviet Union, communism overlapped heavily with socialism, each seeking to defend the primacy of the social or the communal.

Socialism was first of all a philosophical and ethical impulse, but well before Marx it began to take on the clothing of an economic doctrine. Marx it was, however, who provided socialism with an elaborated economic theory. He also placed socialism in the context of an encompassing account of history. Marx’s basic position came to be shared by all socialists, no matter how sharp their other differences. Socialism seeks to confront the limitations of capitalism in order to humanize it or to overthrow it altogether. The economic theory of socialism depends upon the idea that, left to its own devices, capitalism is economically inefficient, socially divisive and unable to reproduce itself in the long term.

The notion that capitalism can be humanized through socialist economic management gives socialism whatever hard edge it possesses, even if there have been many different accounts of how such a goal might be achieved. For Marx, socialism stood or fell by its capacity to deliver a society that would generate greater wealth than capitalism and spread that wealth in more equitable fashion. If socialism is now dead, it is precisely because these claims have collapsed. They have done so in singular fashion. For some quarter of a century following World War II, socialist planning seemed here to stay in both West and East. A prominent economic observer, E.F.M. Durbin, wrote in 1949, ‘we are all Planners now … The collapse of the popular faith in laisser faire has proceeded with spectacular rapidity … all over the world since the War.’2

Socialism in the West became dominated by social democracy – moderate, parliamentary socialism – built upon consolidating the welfare state. In most countries, including Britain, the welfare state was a creation as much of the right as of the left, but in the post-war period socialists came to claim it as their own. For at least some while, even the much more comprehensive planning adopted in the Soviet-style societies appeared economically effective, if always politically despotic. Successive American governments in the 1960s took seriously the claim that the Soviet Union might overtake the US economically within a further thirty years.

In hindsight, we can be fairly clear why the Soviet Union, far from surpassing the US, fell dramatically behind it, and why social democracy encountered its own crises. The economic theory of socialism was always inadequate, underestimating the capacity of capitalism to innovate, adapt and generate increasing productivity. Socialism also failed to grasp the significance of markets as informational devices, providing essential data for buyers and sellers. These inadequacies only became fully revealed with intensifying processes of globalization and technological change from the early 1970s onwards.

Over the period since the mid-1970s, well before the fall of the Soviet Union, social democracy was increasingly challenged by free market philosophies, in particular by the rise of Thatcherism or Reaganism – more generically described as neoliberalism. During the previous period, the idea of liberalizing markets seemed to belong to the past, to an era that had been superseded. From being widely seen as eccentric, the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, the leading advocate of free markets, and other free market critics of socialism suddenly became a force to be reckoned with. Neoliberalism made less of an impact upon most countries in Continental Europe than upon the UK, the US, Australia and Latin America. Yet on the Continent as elsewhere, free market philosophies became influential.

The categories of ‘social democracy’ and ‘neoliberalism’ are wide, and have encompassed groups, movements and parties of various policies and persuasions. Even though each influenced the other, for example, the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher followed different policies in some contexts. When Thatcher first came to power, she did not have a fully fledged ideology, which was developed as she went along. Thatcherite policies followed by ‘left’ parties, as in New Zealand, have put a different cast again upon key policy beliefs. Moreover, neoliberalism has two strands. The main one is conservative – the origin of the term ‘the new right’. Neoliberalism became the outlook of many conservative parties the world over. However, there is an important type of thinking associated with free market philosophies that, in contrast to the conservative one, is libertarian on moral as well as economic issues. Unlike the Thatcherite conservatives, for example, libertarians favour sexual freedom or the decriminalizing of drugs.

Social democracy is an even broader and more ambiguous term. I mean by it parties and other groups of the reformist left, including the British Labour Party. In the early post-war period, social democrats from many different countries shared a broadly similar perspective. This is what I shall refer to as old-style or classical social democracy. Since the 1980s, in response to the rise of neoliberalism and the problems of socialism, social democrats everywhere have started to break away from this prior standpoint.

Social democratic regimes in practice have varied substantially, as have the welfare systems they have nourished. European welfare states can be divided into four institutional groups, all of which share common historical origins, aims and structures:

•the UK system, which emphasizes social services and health, but tends also to have income-dependent benefits;

•Scandinavian or Nordic welfare states, having a very high tax base, universalist in orientation, providing generous benefits and well-funded state services, including health care;

•Middle European systems, having a relatively low commitment to social services, but well-resourced benefits in other respects, financed mainly from employment and based upon social insurance contributions;

•Southern systems, similar in form to the Middle European ones, but less comprehensive and paying lower levels of support.3

Allowing for these variations, classical social democracy and neoliberalism represent two quite distinct political philosophies. I summarize the differences in the two boxes above. Broad-brush comparisons of this sort carry an obvious danger of caricature. Yet the contrasts signalled here are real and important, and the residues of classical social democracy are everywhere still strong.

Classical social democracy (the old left)

Pervasive state involvement in social and economic life

State dominates over civil society

Collectivism

Keynesian demand management, plus corporatism

Confined role for markets: the mixed or social economy

Full employment

Strong egalitarianism

Comprehensive welfare state, protecting citizens ‘from cradle to grave’

Linear modernization

Low ecological consciousness

Internationalism

Belongs to bipolar world

Thatcherism, or neoliberalism (the new right)

Minimal government

Autonomous civil society

Market fundamentalism

Moral authoritarianism, plus strong economic individualism

Labour market clears like any other

Acceptance of inequality

Traditional nationalism

Welfare state as safety net

Linear modernization

Low ecological consciousness

Realist theory of international order

Belongs to bipolar world

Old-style social democracy

Old-style social democracy saw free market capitalism as producing many of the problematic effects Marx diagnosed, but believed these can be muted or overcome by state intervention in the marketplace. The state has the obligation to provide public goods that markets cannot deliver, or can do so only in a fractured way. A strong government presence in the economy, and other sectors of society too, is normal and desirable, since public power, in a democratic society, represents the collective will. Collective decision-making, involving government, business and unions, partly replaces market mechanisms.

For classical social democracy, government involvement in family life is necessary and to be applauded. State benefits are vital for rescuing families in need, and the state should step in wherever individuals, for one reason or another, are unable to fend for themselves. With some conspicuous exceptions, old-style social democrats were inclined to be suspicious of voluntary associations. Such groups often do more bad than good because, as compared with state-provided social services, they tend to be unprofessional, erratic and patronizing to those with whom they deal.

John Maynard Keynes, the economic inspiration of the post-war welfare consensus, was not a socialist, yet he shared some of the emphases of Marx and socialism. Like Marx, Keynes regarded capitalism as having irrational qualities, but he believed these could be controlled to save capitalism from itself. Marx and Keynes both tended to take the productivity of capitalism for granted. The fact that Keynesian theory paid relatively little attention to the supply side of the economy fitted well with social democratic preoccupations. Keynes showed how market capitalism could be stabilized through demand management and the creation of a mixed economy. Although he did not favour it, one feature of the mixed economy in Britain was nationalization. Some economic sectors should be taken out of the market, not only because of the deficiencies of markets, but because industries central to the national interest shouldn’t be in private hands.

The pursuit of equality has been a major concern of all social democrats, including the British Labour Party. Greater equality is to be achieved by various strategies of levelling. Progressive taxation, for example, via the welfare state, takes from the rich to give to the poor. The welfare state has two objectives: to create a more equal society, but also to protect individuals across the life cycle. The earliest welfare measures, dating from the nineteenth century, were introduced by liberals or conservatives, and were often opposed by organized labour. The post-war welfare state, however, has generally had a strong base among the manual working class, which until twenty years ago was the prime source of electoral support for social democratic parties.

Until the setbacks of the late 1970s, social democracy everywhere followed a linear model of modernization – the ‘path of socialism’. Perhaps the most prominent interpreter of the rise of the welfare state in the UK, the sociologist T.H. Marshall, provided a compelling exposition of such a model. The welfare state is the high point of a lengthy process of the evolution of citizenship rights. Like most others in the early post-war period, Marshall expected that welfare systems would progressively expand, matching economic development with the ever-fuller implementation of social rights.

By and large, old-style social democracy did not have a hostile attitude towards ecological concerns, but found it difficult to accommodate to them. Its corporatist emphasis, its orientation to full employment and its overwhelming stress upon the welfare state made it ill-adapted to confronting ecological issues in a systematic way. Nor in practice did it have a strong global outlook. Social democracy was internationalist in its orientation, looking to create solidarity between like-minded political parties rather than confronting global problems as such. Yet it was strongly bound up with the bipolar world – situated between the welfare minimalism of the US and the command economies of communism.

The neoliberal outlook

Hostility to ‘big government’, a first and prime characteristic of neoliberal views, comes from several sources. The founding father of conservatism in Britain, Edmund Burke, expressed his distaste for the state, which if expanded too far becomes the enemy of freedom and self-reliance. American conservatism has long been hostile to centralized government. Thatcherism drew upon these ideas, but also upon classical liberal scepticism about the role of the state, based on economic arguments about the superior nature of markets. The thesis of the minimal state is closely bound up with a distinctive view of civil society as a self-generating mechanism of social solidarity. The little platoons of civil society must be allowed to flourish, and will do so if unhampered by state intervention. The virtues of civil society, if left to its own devices, are said to include ‘Good character, honesty, duty, self-sacrifice, honour, service, self-discipline, toleration, respect, justice, self-improvement, trust, civility, fortitude, courage, integrity, diligence, patriotism, consideration for others, thrift and reverence’.4 To the modern ear, the writer says, these ‘have a ring of antique charm’ – but this is because state power has suppressed them, through sabotaging civil society.

The state, particularly the welfare state, is said to be destructive of the civil order, but markets are not, because they thrive on individual initiative. Like the civil order, if left to themselves markets will deliver the greatest good to society. Markets ‘are perpetual motion machines, requiring only a legal framework and government non-interference to deliver uninterrupted growth’.5

Neoliberals link unfettered market forces to a defence of traditional institutions, particularly the family and the nation. Individual initiative is to develop in the economy, but obligations and duties should be promoted in these other spheres. The traditional family is a functional necessity for social order, as is the traditional nation. Other family types, such as single-parent households, or homosexual relationships, only contribute to social decay. Much the same goes for anything that weakens national integrity. Xenophobic overtones are normally clear in the pronouncements of neoliberal authors and politicians – they reserve some of their severest strictures for multiculturalism.

Thatcherism characteristically is indifferent to inequalities, or actively endorses them. The idea that ‘social inequality is inherently wrong or harmful’ is ‘naive and implausible’.6 Above all, it is against egalitarianism. Egalitarian policies, most obviously those followed in Soviet Russia, create a society of drab uniformity, and can only be implemented by the use of despotic power. Those closer to liberalism, however, see equality of opportunity as desirable and necessary. This was the sense in which John Major, improbably echoing Marx, spoke of his intention to create a classless society. A society where the market has free play may create large economic inequalities, but these don’t matter as long as people with determination and ability can rise to positions that fit their capacities.

Antagonism to the welfare state is one of the most distinctive neoliberal traits. The welfare state is seen as the source of all evils in much the way capitalism once was by the revolutionary left. ‘We shall look back on the welfare state with the same contemptuous amusement as that with which we now view slavery as a means of organising effective, motivated work’, one writer says. The welfare state ‘wreaks enormously destructive harm on its supposed beneficiaries: the vulnerable, the disadvantaged and the unfortunate … cripples the enterprising, self-reliant spirit of individual men and women, and lays a depth charge of explosive resentment under the foundations of our free society’.7

What provides welfare if the welfare state is to be dismantled? The answer is market-led economic growth. Welfare should be understood not as state benefits, but as maximizing economic progress, and therefore overall wealth, by allowing markets to work their miracles. This orientation normally goes along with a dismissal of ecological problems as scare-stories. Thatcher made a nod in the direction of ‘green capitalism’, but the usual attitude has been one of hostility. Ecological risks, it has been said, are exaggerated or non-existent – the invention of doom-mongers. The evidence points instead towards an era of greater and more universal prosperity than has ever been known before. This is a linear view of modernization, which almost writes out of court any limits to economic development.