involve a greater number of citizens from the North and the South in
the development debate.
To sum up, progressive forces may have been slow to respond to the
rise of neoliberalism in the early 1980s, but after the end of the Cold
War, the collaboration forged among TSMOs, NGOs, international
organizations, and some national governments gradually transformed
world politics. The global left fashioned a new discourse, which
was consistent with the emerging domestic preoccupations of social-
democrats, and was heard everywhere, from the corridors of major
international institutions to the slums of Third World cities. The pri-
mary concerns of this renewed global left were constructed around
the idea of a fair world economy, and included the fight against
poverty, gender equality, debt cancellation, the promotion of fair
trade and sustainable development, increases in foreign aid, and the
empowerment of civil society. At home, just as parties of the left
were accepting some of the tenets of neoliberalism, social movements
also adopted new causes and identities and, more broadly, fought for
what British sociologist Anthony Giddens called “the democratizing
of democracy.”^33
The Third Way
In April 1999, Bill Clinton organized a meeting in Washington with
Tony Blair, Gerhard Schro ̈der, and Dutch and Italian social-democratic
prime ministers Wim Kok and Massimo D’Alema. The five leaders
decided to launch a new international center-left alliance, the Pro-
gressive Governance movement, which would meet annually, starting
with a conference in Berlin in June 2000. A few months after the
Washington meeting, Blair and Schro ̈der released a joint paper, to
present their center-left ideas for the future of Europe.^34 The social-
democratic left was now in power, and in a position to define and
implement its own vision for the coming years.
The Third Way andDie Neue Mitte, explained Blair and Schro ̈der,
were the labels used in British and German politics to capture a new
(^33) Anthony Giddens,Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics,
Stanford University Press, 1994, pp. 16 and 113.
(^34) Anthony Giddens,The Third Way and Its Critics, Cambridge, Polity Press,
2000, pp. 4–6; Policy Network, “Progressive Governance Network”
(www.progressive-governance.net/aboutus/index.aspx?id=58).
Twenty-first-century rapprochement 175