A reflection on the rise and fall of the philosophy Blair had hoped would form the heart of a new era for the centre-left; penned originally for Policy World.
The closing of the Blair era has sparked an inevitable debate about his policy legacy. While it is, arguably, too soon to offer a balanced assessment of Blair’s place in history, it has been evident for some time that Blair himself has been concerned with the ‘legacy issue’. It might even be suggested that since taking over as leader of the Labour Party, Blair has had a strong desire tie his leadership to an epoch defining shift in the values of the (centre-)left: in abandoning the historic Clause IV of the party’s constitution, rebadging the party as ‘New Labour’ and weakening its links with the trade union movement, Blair has been keen to demonstrate his modernising instincts and to draw clear blue water between the ‘Old Labour’ approach and his own.
Yet, while Blair was clear from day one in office that New Labour needed to be different from Old Labour – and equally clear that it must be distinct from the New Right - he was acutely aware that that his early ideas might appear somewhat anchorless. While a new language accompanied New Labour - his speeches were peppered with terms such as ‘community’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘responsibility’ and traditional staples of Labour Party rhetoric such as ‘equality’, ‘redistribution’ ‘socialism’ and even ‘Labour’ were rarely used – his approach often appeared to be defined in opposition to an established set of values rather than offering a deep and coherent alternative philosophy. Though his New Labour vehicle instantly struck a populist note that appealed to voters, after just a few months in power Blair publicly expressed concern about the need for New Labour to outline a defining philosophy for his government that could rival Thatcherism. It was at this time that references to the potential for a ‘Third Way’ began to appear in his speeches, with Blair’s thoughts inspired in part by the exchange of ideas between his own team of policy advisors and the then US President Bill Clinton’s advisors during an extended ‘wonkathon’ that took place in Chequers in November 1997.
However, quite what a ‘Third Way’ would mean in practice remained a moot point. In January 1998, Blair turned to academe and the think tanks for help. Over the course of January and February, Downing Street, together with the Cambridge based think tank Nexus, ran an open seminar on the Third Way. The choice of Nexus as the partner is this endeavour was something of a surprise. It was hardly an established Labour Party leaning think tank akin to the Fabian Society or even the IPPR. Nor had it blazed a media trail with its work in the way that the then recently established Demos had done. In fact, few people had heard of it and, perhaps, few remember it today (it has long since perished). Perhaps this was because Nexus was not a formal organisation at all, but an internet based network. The early days of New Labour coincided with the early days of the world wide web and the choice of a new think tank that presented itself as being at the cutting edge of the internet ‘revolution’ chimed thoroughly with New Labour’s own image. Much of the debate took place online, with papers from (amongst others), the (then) Director of the IPPR, Gerald Holthan, the (then) General Secretary of the Fabian Society, Michael Jacobs, and the MIT’s Stuart White. Follow ups included many pieces by academics, including David Marquand of Oxford University and Julian Le Grand of the LSE. There was a large element of interactivity, with 300 members of the NEXUS network mailing list (which was semi-open) able to discuss the papers and offer their own thoughts via e-mail.
While critics might suggest that the outcomes of the debate were, at best, somewhat fuzzy, a summary of the debate was produced by the NEXUS director, David Halpern, and discussed at a Third Way seminar in Number 10 in May 1998 that was organised by the (then) Director of Policy in the Downing Street Policy Unit, David Miliband. But, what the ‘Third Way’ lacked in intellectual coherence it more than compensated for with political momentum. Over the course of the summer, the ideas developed during these discussions were fleshed out and in September there was a triple whammy of Third Way landmarks. Firstly, the Fabian Society published a short pamphlet by Blair on titled ‘The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century’ in which the Prime Minister outlined his version of the new philosophy. At the same time, the (then) Director of the London School of Economics, Anthony Giddens, published ‘Third Way: the Renewal of Social Democracy’. Giddens had been working with Blair for sometime – he had been invited to the New Labour-New Democrat wonkathon that had taken place in Chequers – and his book provided some intellectual boosterism to the Third Way concept. Finally, to coincide with these events, Blair (and Giddens) flew to New York to join Clinton and the then Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi for a high level seminar on the potential for the Third Way concept to the form the basis of a new (cross-national) approach to social democracy.
These events placed some serious political momentum behind the idea of a Third Way and the following year-and-a-half probably marked its political high-point as Blair and Clinton continued pushed the idea hard while also aiming to flesh out its meaning. Significantly, further high-level, cross national seminars took place throughout the next 18 months, with an increasing number of political leaders joining the gatherings. The increasing scale of these events is certainly worthy of note. In April 1999, a roundtable discussion in Washington titled ‘The Third Way: Progressive Governance’, was attended by Blair and Clinton, along with the newly elected German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, and the longer standing Prime Ministers of Sweden and the Netherlands - Wim Kok and Göran Persson. This was event was soon followed by a further seminar in Florence in November, where the French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, and the Brazilian President, Fernando Cardoso, joined the discussions. A still bigger meeting took place just over six months later, this time in Berlin, with the launch of a Third Way rooted ‘network for progressive governance’ being attended by 14 centre left leaders. Much emerged from these events, not least a joint communiqué issued by Blair and Schröder in May 1999 that looked to map out a path for social democracy throughout Europe. In ‘Europe: The Third Way/Die Neue Mietee’, the two leaders openly invited all European social democrats to join them in their plans for modernisation of centre-left thinking and, with social democrats seemingly in the political ascendancy across Europe, their prospects for forging a new political movement seemed very bright indeed.
Yet, despite all of this activity, the very idea of a ‘Third Way’ was greeted with much scepticism, particularly within the UK. During the Nexus debate in early 1998, the Fabian Society’s Michael Jacobs had effectively summed up the views of many when he argued that ‘in the context of Blairite politics the concept of a ‘Third Way’ [is] an exercise in ‘phrase-making’, an attempt to find a new label for the political philosophy / ideology towards which New Labour is groping’. Little had seemed to change in the subsequent period. At the close of the Florence seminar, Will Hutton appeared somewhat perplexed by the discord between the energy being invested by so many political leaders in exploring the potential for a Third Way and the idea’s reception more generally. Writing in The Observer he said he had ‘witnessed nothing like it my journalistic career… six purported Left-of-Centre heads of state will spend a day in Florence talking about what it will mean to be progressive in the next century… Not since the war has there been such a concentration of international political power discussing a political idea’. Yet, he noted that ‘The Third Way has not had much of a hearing in Britain… dismissed as purposeless guff; substance-free, New Labour meanderings lacking rigour’. Indeed, while not without sympathy for the project itself, he suggested that, in the UK at least, ‘the Third Way has bombed before it has even been properly launched’.
Certainly the muted reception of the idea seemed to rankle with its key exponents. In 2000, Giddens tried to respond to much of the scorn in a new book, ‘The Third Way and its Critics’. However, with Clinton’s term of office coming to a close – and Bush poised to replace him in the White House – the slowing political momentum behind the Third Way made it difficult to tackle such strong scepticism. Certainly Clinton seemed to concede as much when, making one of his final speeches as President, he told an invited audience at Warwick University that: ‘We [Blair and Clinton] have worked hard in our respective nations and in our multinational memberships to try to develop a response to globalization that we all call by the shorthand term, the Third Way. Sometimes I think that term tends to be viewed as more of a political term than one that has actual policy substance, but for us it’s a very serious attempt to put a human face on the global economy’. Reflecting on the speech in The Times, Peter Riddel noted that ‘The imminent departure of Bill Clinton from the White House is in marked contrast with the triumphalist days of just two years ago’ and he concluded that, for all their hopes of providing a new political philosophy for the 21st century, just one year into the new millennium ‘The Third Way has become unfashionable’.
Blair and Giddens, however, looked to keep the momentum going after Clinton’s departure. Perhaps as a response to the growing scepticism at home, they looked to emphasise the Third Way’s global reach. Writing in Prospect magazine in March 2001, Blair bemoaned the reception given to Third Way ideas in his own country, claiming it was ironic that while the movement commanded international attention that ‘in Britain, where New Labour pioneered some of these ideas, the Third Way is often disparaged as ‘meaningless’, ‘reheated liberalism’, ‘neither one thing or the other’.’ Rather than ditching the idea, however, he promised a ‘Third Way, Phase Two’, arguing the new movement offered an effective modernisation of social democratic values and was already of great historical significance on the grounds that ‘It is a Third Way for Britain because it represents a third phase of post-war history - following the settlements of 1945 and 1979.’ At the same time, Giddens published another book on the concept - ‘The Global Third Way Debate’ – that struck many similar notes, though it lacked the coherence of his earlier works insofar as this piece was an edited collection drawing on mainly already published pieces written by a mixture of politicians, policy analysts and academics from across the world.
Significantly, by now there were signs of admissions from Blair and Giddens that the label itself was perhaps unhelpful: a small passage in Blair’s Prospect piece said as much when referring to ‘Third Way politics, or ‘progressive government’ as some describe it’. The gatherings of ‘Third Way’ leaders that had begun in Washington in 1999 with the explicit purpose of discussing the concept – and coincided with the launch of Blair’s Fabian Pamphlet – had now been rebranded as ‘Progressive Governance Summits’. Indeed, when, in December 2000, Blair, Schröder, Persson and (then) Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato helped launch ‘Policy Network’, a more formal institute designed as a vehicle for sharing thinking about the future of social democracy, the term ‘Third Way’ was notable in its absence, replaced, for the most part, by meeker notions of ‘progressive politics’ and ‘progressive governance’.
How far this disagreement over labels represented a disagreement over ideas is a difficult question to address. Certainly the historical connotations of the ‘Third Way’ were problematic in some countries and, for instance, Schröder’s preference for the term ‘the new middle’ over the ‘Third Way’ seems to owe more to linguistic heritage than policy difference. How far the loss of momentum behind the idea represented its failure to capture the political imagination is a more straightforward question to address, for by 2002 it seemed to be rapidly moving off the radar. In March, Blair delivered a keynote speech to an invited audience of academics, policy analysts and think tank staff that reflected on five years of New Labour in power. The venue, the London School of Economics, Giddens still its Director, seemed tailor made for a set-piece talk about the virtues of Third Way thinking. Instead, Blair conceded that the New Labour philosophy had been ‘unclear and controversial’ and that there was a danger that, in dealing with the daily concerns of government, New Labour had ‘lost sight of the destination’. Rather than outlining how the Third Way had provided a clear vision of where New Labour should be going, Blair instead admitted that ‘sometimes it can seem as if [governing] were a mere technocratic exercise, well or less well managed, but with no overriding moral purpose to it… [we need] to explain the ‘why’ of the programme, to describe it not point by point but principle by principle.’
Significantly, it was not the need for a ‘Third Way’ that featured heavily in this speech about principles, but the need for a ‘Third Phase’ of New Labour: the first being shifting to the centre-left after defeat in 1992, the second laying firm (economic) foundations after gaining power in 1997 and the third phase being delivery of public service reforms in Labour’s second term. Indeed, the phrase ‘Third Way’ did not feature: ‘progressive consensus’ was the preferred terminology on this occasion. In the media – and on the Conservative Party benches - the speech was widely interpreted as an attempt to ‘relaunch’ New Labour. A headline in The Independent neatly summed up the views of the commentariat: ‘Forget the Third Way, now it’s the Third Phase’.
At this time, media perception that the Third Way was already an idea whose time had been and gone was heightened by the declining political fortunes of many of the leaders who had attended the early Third Way summits: by the summer of 2002 Jospin had given way to Raffarin as Prime Minister of France, Kok to Balkenende in the Netherlands and Amato to Berlusconi in Italy. A swing to the right seemed to be in evidence and when Blair hosted a Third Way meeting in Chequers during the summer of 2002, it was a reduced gathering as a consequence, with Schröder, Persson and the Finnish Prime Minister, Paavo Lipponen, being the only national leaders in attendance. Clinton, amongst others, was invited too in order to add some political weight, but for some commentators the dwindling attendance at the event was proof that whatever momentum there had been behind the idea was well and truly lost. The, Sunday Times, interpreted the event as an emergency summit convened to save the movement and concluded that ‘The ‘Third Way’ championed by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton has been blown off course by the rise of the right in Europe.’
The Chequers meeting may well have been a last ditch crisis meeting for the Third Way. If so, how far Blair and Clinton decided it was worth fighting for the concept itself is unclear. Certainly it seems that Clinton agreed to make it the theme of a speech he would deliver to the Labour Party annual conference later that year at which he told party members that the ‘Third Way works’. Blair defended the concept in an interview with Prospect magazine too, telling its editor David Goodhart that, far from being redundant, all of his New Labour agenda could be read in Third Way terms. Added to this, in the summer of 2003 Blair hosted another of the Progressive Governance conferences in London, with an expanded gathering billed as the ‘largest ever gathering of international centre-left leaders, policy-makers, politicians and thinkers’. Fourteen heads of state were in attendance (from: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Ethiopia, Germany, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Sweden and the UK), along with participants from some thirty countries. Yet, while speeches by Clinton (who argued that ‘the Third Way should be the dominant mode of thinking about change in 21st century’) and Blair (who claimed ‘only a modernised social democracy – the true description of the Third Way… can offer a sensible answer to [globalisation’s] challenge’) front-staged the Third Way, they appeared increasingly isolated in their advocacy of this terminology. Indeed, a joint communiqué issued by the heads of government at the end of the conference did not mention the ‘Third Way’ at all, with ‘progressive governance’ again being the preferred term.
Moreover, for all the hubbub surrounding the London Progressive Governance conference, 2003 did not represent a good year for Third Way leaning social democrats. There were further changes in political fortunes that robbed the movement of some of its main figures, Finland’s Paavo Lipponen losing power to Anneli Jäätteenmäki’s centrist party and Canada’s Jean Chrétien resigning as Prime Minister after becoming mired in scandal for instance. But above and beyond this, Bush’s increasingly belligerent foreign policy began to place a wedge between leading social democrats in Europe. Most notably, less than five years after issuing a joint manifesto on the future of social democracy – and calling on all European social democrats to work together with them on their project - Blair and Schröder disagreed so vehemently over the question of military action in Iraq that it became difficult to imagine that they had ever shared a joint platform.
Iraq, as with so much of Blair’s legacy, seemed to be the turning point in his ambitions for an international Third Way project. Shorn of the support of Schröder and increasingly allied to Bush in a manner that made overt links with the Democrats all but impossible, Blair now lacked the political capital he had earlier been able to draw on in his dealings with social democrat leaders. Blair’s ambivalent position towards John Kerry’s campaign during the 2004 US Presidential election seemed a far cry from the days when the Clinton and Blair teams had worked so closely together on policy ideas and campaign strategies. Likewise, Schröder’s implacable opposition to the war drove him ever closer to the French political leadership – despite their centre-right leanings - and, ultimately, led him to condemn Blair’s approach as being too ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to be of use in shaping German public policy. Iraq also divided New Labour from their social democratic counterparts in New Zealand and Australia at this time: in both countries the Labo(u)r Party leaders were, unusually, relatively happy to sign up to the label of the ‘Third Way’ (in fact, Mark Latham, the (then) leader of the Australian Labor Party, even had a chapter in Giddens ‘The Global Third Way Debate’), but both were also heavily opposed to the war.
By the time the Progressive Governance network assembled for another of their international summits in October of that year in Budapest, the band of leaders sharing the platform with Blair had noticeably thinned. Helen Clark, Prime Minister of New Zealand, was the only other serving head of a high-income OECD nation present, some of the others were rookies on the world stage (Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány was less than month into office) and many of the more established leaders, such as South African President Thabo Mbeki and Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, had previously been very much on the margins of the network. They might, perhaps, have been joined by Australia’s Mark Latham had his ALP not, in a general election held just days previously, failed dismally in their attempts to dislodge John Howard’s government. As with the US Presidential elections, once close ties that had existed between New Labour and the ALP during the mid-1990s were nowhere to be seen during this campaign, not least because Howard’s decision to join Bush and Blair in deploying Australian troops in Iraq (and Latham’s commitment to withdraw them by Christmas if he took over) again made it impossible for him to be critical of an important right-wing leaning military ally. In the wake of the Iraq conflict, the sense of unity and common purpose to be found amongst the centre-left parties at the turn of the century had dissipated almost as quickly as it had emerged.
From hereon in, the Third Way appeared to slip away into the ether. There were further electoral defeats: Romania’s Nastase fell just months after the Budapest summit; while Blair and Clark squeaked home in 2005, Schröder, his government in gridlock, called a snap election that he lost to Angela Merkel; and, in 2006, Persson’s Social Democrats lost their grip on power in Sweden. But, aside from the electoral defeats, talk of the Third Way itself seemed to almost die out completely. Media discussion of the idea began almost non-existent and even Giddens’ output on the topic waned: there were no new Third Way themed books and, aside from the odd short piece (including a slightly odd article in the New Statesman in which he suggested that Gaddafi was using Third Way ideas to transform Libya), his attentions appeared to be shifting elsewhere. Less than a decade into the new millennium, the new philosophy for the 21st century appeared to be dead-in-the-water.
Or was it? There are good reasons for us being wary of calling time on the Third Way. Its exponents might well claim that there has been a shift towards the centre ground in many of the nations where the Third Way social democrats lost power. In Germany, Merkel’s Chancellorship is only possible on the basis of a power sharing arrangement with the Social Democrats. In the UK, the Conservatives appear to have shifted to the centre also. Certainly Blair regards this as a central part of his legacy; in a dossier outlining his legacy that was recently sent to all Labour MPs, he claimed: ‘Labour in office has combined objectives which had once been considered competing opposites… [consequently] the essence of Third Way politics is now the guiding principle for all mainstream British political parties.’
On top of this, while Blair’s time in the political spotlight has drawn to an end, many of those who played such a key role in cooking up the Third Way in the first place remain very much on the scene. In particular, David Miliband’s role should not be under-estimated: as Head of the Downing Street Policy Unit during Blair’s early years, he was played a leading role in the joint meetings between the New Democrats and New Labour, was responsible for drawing Giddens into these discussions and for mobilising the Nexus network that played an important early role in the debate. Quite what the election of a President Hilary Clinton in 2008 would mean for the Third Way remains to be seen – if it occurs; she was heavily involved in early Third Way events too (in fact, it was Hilary, rather than Bill, Clinton, that lead the New Democrat party delegation at the first ‘Third Way’ gathering at Chequers way back in November 1997).
Ultimately, we might also ask whether the disappearance of the label equates with the disappearance of the political agenda. This seems unlikely. In his latest book – ‘Over to You, Mr Brown – Giddens largely eschews the phrase ‘Third Way’ and even concedes that it ‘is not an especially luminous term’. Yet, his suggestions for a future agenda do not differ radically from his earlier thoughts. What is more, he is resistant to suggestions that it was a mistake to use the term, not least because the choice of such a bold phrase helped open up a wide debate about the future of social democracy. And, despite the debates over terminology, the modernisers looking to push social democrats towards the political centre seem to retain the political momentum across much of the world. How far Blair can claim to have been responsible for shaping this movement is open to question; but in making such a bold attempt to drive the debate along, it seems likely that, though the hand of history is no longer on his shoulder, Blair has ensured that the Third Way will need to merit more than a mere footnote in the history of social democracy.
