Book review : GIDDENS, Anthony, The Third Way: the Renewal of Social Democracy, Cambridge, Polity, 1998

Résumé du document

Faced to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the socialist bloc in the late 1980s on the one hand, and the advanced spread of the neoliberal discourse, on the other, European social democrat parties started a process of discussion which aimed to analyse realistically the global changes that the society, the economy and the very subjects had experienced in the last decades, and thus, aimed to recover the lost support of the electorate (Giddens, 1998). They tried to find a renovated discourse that, standing on the social democratic value's platform, would be able to offer a new framework of thinking and policymaking which would be ‘beyond the Old Left and the New Right', that is, different from traditional social democracy and neoliberalism (Giddens, 1999).
The focus of this book review is to discuss to what extent those accusations were right: According to Anthony Giddens, was the Third Way just neoliberalism in disguise? In order to answer this question, we will first try to define what he understand as neoliberalism, and then, to describe what the Third Way proposal was about.

Extraits

[...] Third Way-ism was on the table to such extent that it was chosen `European of the year' in 1999 by Newsweek (Giddens, 1999). It appeared as a real and new alternative to follow or discuss, and so, at least electorally, it worked. In 1997, committed with that project of renewal, the English New Labour Party won the elections, and Tony Blair replaced Margaret Thatcher, the rightist Prime Minister that had ruled England for a period of 18 years. Furthermore, other centre-leftist parties and politicians of the time reached power adhering to the trend - the Third Way spread to the U.S. [...]

[...] The concept of Third Way in the book The concept of Third Way is an effort to synthesise the ideas which drive the renovation of social democracy (Driver and Martell, 2000), which in the case of Great Britain is associated with the politics of New Labour and Tony Blair (Giddens, 1998). The name tries to emphasise the `newness' of New Labour regarding `the two dominant political philosophies of the post-war period' (Giddens, 1999) - it is an attempt to construct a politics which goes `beyond Old Left and New Right' (Blair in Driver and Martell, 2000: 148). [...]

[...] The ecological issue is the fourth identified by Giddens. The interest of its development on the subject resides less in the revision of the problems posed by the control of the environment in the modification of the environment. He deduces that politics is less secure than the hazards of science and technology that helps to live in a "society of risks". Thus, the third way, introduced on the book, can be a way to understand how Emmanuel Macron ran and won the French presidential election in 2017. [...]

[...] education as way of social mobility). Such individualism still menaces social cohesion and solidarity, thus new means has to be found in order to get and equilibrium between them and to construct `civic culture'. The political program of the Third Way involves all sectors of society, but takes the modernisation of the state and government as the guiding principle (Giddens, 1998). Giddens summarises: The Government can act in association with instances of the civil society to foster the renewal and development of the community. [...]

[...] The central theme here is an irreversible globalisation - a process which entails important economic changes, like the significant openness of the national markets and the increasing weight of the transnational financial markets (Giddens, 1998). Globalisation, however, is not only seen as economic interdependence, but as a change to the culture, to the lifestyles and to the family (Blair in Driver and Martell, 2000). It has to be handled `positively', says Giddens (1998: whereas economic and cultural protectionism has to be rejected, since it is `undesirable and senseless'. II. [...]