Criticism of the Third Way in Politics

Authors Stephen Mayer and Luke Martell analyze in an optimistic mood the back then, new paradigm in policy making known as the Third Way. They sustain that it is the more pragmatic and limited notion of public policy, and not the more ideological one, that better define the third way. Third way thinking, they state, is not as radical as it seems. They convey that this paradigm is initially a negative approach, but beyond this basis there are positive meanings in terms of values (equality and community) and means (the role for government). Rather than transcending left and right, they say, it manages to produce new configurations in which Left and Right can coexist in a coherent and beneficial way. However, twelve years after the publication of this article, we can safely assure that the notions expressed are no longer as convincing as they appeared, for the Third Way has contributed through its contradictory and paradoxical foundation to create a blurrier political landscape, leading to stagnation in ideological debate.

The term, in a broader sense, is more of a reinvention of the late 1970’s traditional notion of social democracy in response to the wave of neo-liberalism that took the world in early 1980’s. In essence, it looked for a mean of combining traditional concerns of social justice and equality into an economic structure based on the free market philosophy. Since then, supporters of this paradigm have searched for ways to defend the apparent originality of their proposal. Yet, they have failed to consider whether attempts of public policies crafted under this ideology are neutralized by the abrasive nature of Western consumer capitalism. The implicit philosophy of the third way is not based on any critical analysis of modern capitalism at all.

Precisely, expanding on the above assertion, I believe that the Third way implicitly accepts the two most important ideas of Liberalism. First, that the main role of any government is to increase the rate of economic growth, and second, that the best way to achieve this growth is through the seamlessly free operation of private markets and actors, although in some situations constraints must be placed on those operations.

Third Way governments saw a boom across Europe, and far beyond (take as example the cases of Brazil and USA) at the end of the 20th century. The Third Way undoubtedly had a strong back up and attracted attention worldwide, as its powerful advocates, such as Blair and Clinton, pronounced long speeches and debates over the innovative ideology across the world. Yet only a few years later, what appeared to be a sounding political alternative disappeared even faster than it had found itself in the agenda of political analysis and research. The so called New Democrats (Clinton’s party) were defeated by Republican George W. Bush. Across European countries, parties of the Right took back the power from third way governments from the Centre-Left. And although Tony Blair, assuredly the Third Way’s fiercest advocate, remained in power, a wide range of his Centre-Left colleagues in France, Spain and Italy were also defeated.

What can explain such a drop in popularity for what seemed to be a viable political project? In first instance, one of the main criticisms of the Third Way is that it makes use of a lot of rhetoric to disguise a lack of substance or at least that its substance is other than that which it claims. Third Way discourses are more of a disguise for a kind of neo-liberal project than they appear on the rhetorical sense. Furthermore,

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