John Lloyd, at an international summit in Berlin, finds that the Third Way is alive and well, providing you don't call it that any more
The Third Way is regarded as a joke in Britain. A right-wing political dictionary would define it as "an empty phrase, meaningless babble designed to cover lack of principle"; a left-wing dictionary as "a device to give the illusion that hard choices between socialism and capitalism need not be made; a synonym for Thatcherism". The agreement of left and right that the phrase is tainted and the practice nugatory has meant that discussion of it has largely left the public arena. Mockery has driven it into internal exile.
It has also suffered internationally. The Third Way's great success was to sign up Gerhard Schroder, the German Chancellor, even before he won office. Later, he developed the ideas as "die Neue Mitte" (the New Middle). But his Social Democratic Party, less hungry for office than new Labour, gagged at it. Massimo D'Alema of Italy, before his recent resignation, also trimmed to the left in order to mollify his party. The last Third Way summit in Florence was renamed "Progressive Governance", a name that was used again in Berlin at the latest gathering.
Yet despite the unhappy history of the phrase itself, the search for a third way remains the main political game in town, perhaps even (although it is unacknowledged) for the centre right, as evidenced by the present Spanish and Irish administrations. It is an attempt to construct societies that can protect their citizens in an age of globalisation; to democratise the content and practices of globalisation; and to recast the explicit and implicit contracts that citizens make with the state.
The Berlin summit was hugely expanded from the initial US-UK gathering two years ago. All the main European states were there, with three Latin American countries, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. Tony Blair was not there because of his paternity leave - an absence that was regarded dimly by the German hosts.
I was one of a handful of journalists (and the only British one) invited to the session of about 150 experts - mainly full-time or part-time policy advisers to governments - that preceded the leaders' talks. The meeting was held in the building of the former East German Council of Ministers: around us, on murals and on stained glass, were portraits of determined workers, hard-at-work scientists, jolly farm labourers and carefree families in a state of achieved socialism.
The most arresting comments came from South Africa and Chile, during a discussion on the state and civil society (trade unions, churches, political parties and any other type of voluntary organisation not sponsored by the state). Mojankunyame Gumbi, an adviser to the South African president, observed that the western concept of the two as separate, even antithetical, was one she did not recognise. In South Africa, civil society assisted the state because it had the same goals - economic development, the war on poverty and ending the consequences of racial discrimination and colonialism. She allowed that independent organisations could be opposed to the government, but did not think that the bulk of civil society should be viewed as detached from state power.
Clarisa Hardy, an adviser to the Chilean president, said that, in her country, civil society was neither oppositionist nor supportive; after the depredations of the Pinochet era, it was simply absent. Indeed, both state and non-governmental organisations were weak. Each required the strengthening of the other, against those, such as the military or big business, who preferred an atomised society.
These were striking challenges to western preconceptions. For them, civil society is the arena within which the overburdened state should seek resolutions to its dilemmas. Jurgen Kocka, a professor of history at the Free University of Berlin, said: "Civil society stands for a space and for self-organisation in society, between the government and the private sphere. Now, when we hear the triumphal note of capitalism, we have to ask: can civil society, in conjunction with the state, control the market economy?" The suggestion that state and society should develop a common front against the market is not so far from Gumbi's flat insistence that her society saw no contradiction between them. In both comments, there is the spectre of a kind of corporatism - at worst, a progressive tyranny. If the Third Way entails a social correlative to the dynamism of capitalism - social entrepreneurs who can move and shake - who is to differentiate these from the state whose purposes they serve?
Wolfgang van den Daele, of Berlin's Wissenschaftszentrum ("Knowledge Centre") spoke to this fear. The progressive state's empowerment of civil society could result in its own undoing - the victim, as Lenin once put it with relish, fashioning a noose for his own head. "The empowerment of social groups may split society rather than bind it together. While civil society is expected to be a public sphere between state and market, it may also become a source of revolt against state and market - by encouraging moral fundamentalism, the politics of identity and radical constitutional revisionism."
The state intrudes deeper and deeper into the life of the citizens. Pierre Rosanvallon, director of studies at the Paris High School of Social Sciences, said his favourite example was the health department notice above the toilet sink: "Now wash your hands!" For all that, he said, "the costs of the providing state grow and grow, and the results are more and more unequal". Its legitimacy was now in question and the role of progressive government was the reconstruction of that legitimacy.
In contrast to Thatcherism, progressives do not see the citizen as a privately calculating actor whose economic choices determine the benign outcome of an efficient and orderly society. Rather, the citizen needs to be located in a network of relationships and activities. Underlying this is a dour view that the citizenry has to do more for itself. In an article for his party journal earlier this year, Schroder, now free in his new popularity to return to "Neue Mitte" themes without the label attached to them, went further than Blair has ever done in exhorting the citizens to assume greater responsibility for themselves and to cease to rely on the providing state. This is not new ("ask not what your country can do for you . . ."), but it is newly, and more convincingly posed: in all the rich western countries, the state is doing less for at least some of the people, impelling them to do more for themselves.
But how to make them active without making them dismissive? Self-interest may play a part: an old Thatcherite ally, but one that can also be pressed into a more civil service. In a paper written late last year, Geoff Mulgan, now a member of Blair's Policy Unit, argues that people have a predisposition to be social, co-operative and trustful - if only an active state can provide the right context. "Active" is the key word in the Third Way lexicon - one that helps sum up the large gulf between it and the right. "Too little government," writes Mulgan, echoing the concern of the new Chilean government of the left, "can be as much of a problem as too much. Recent history shows that societies with weak governments are rarely blessed with stronger and more self-reliant people, more dynamic economies and a richer civic life."
It was a point made, some centuries ago, by the political philosopher whom Margaret Thatcher claimed as her own - Adam Smith. His more famous point was that the greed of tradesmen was more reliable than their generosity. But Smith also believed that humans were social animals, and thus were as "greedy" for society as they were for lucre. On that greed, a new left is seeking to erect institutions for its hegemony.
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