social-democratic perspective, which was faithful to the perennial
values of the left but also in tune with the demands of “today’s world.”
In the past decades, the two leaders wrote, the left had focused too
much on “equality of outcome” and not enough on the importance of
“rewarding effort and responsibility”; it had favored solutions that
were often bureaucratic and expensive, and forgotten that “social
conscience cannot be measured by the level of public expenditures”;
it had put more weight on rights than on responsibilities; and it had
undervalued “the importance of individual and business enterprise
to the creation of wealth.”^35 The world, however, had changed, and
the left could no longer let itself be trapped in an “ideological
straitjacket” inherited from the past.
Modernization, globalization, and technological evolution made
products, capital, and labor markets more fluid and required flexible
rules. Changed gender roles, new family structures, and longer life
expectancy imposed a revision of welfare programs just as the level of
public expenditures “more or less reached the limits of acceptability.”
And unprecedented threats with respect to the environment, crime,
and poverty had to be addressed. To do so, social-democrats needed
to bet on “a new entrepreneurial spirit at all levels of society.” They
had, in particular, to foster the development of a qualified and well-
paid workforce, through a social security system that encouraged
“initiative.” Progressives also needed to accept private enterprise and
partnerships of all kinds more readily, and aim for a leaner state,
which “should not row, but steer.”^36 In policy terms, these orienta-
tions translated into a “new supply-side agenda for the left” premised
on: a market framework favorable to competition; streamlined and
lower income and business taxes; flexible social and labor market
policies to encourage rapid transitions from school, unemployment, or
welfare to work; strong investments in education and training; and
sound public finances. These choices might appear to some rather
close to those of the conservatives, but for Blair and Schro ̈der this
was a mistaken view. “Modern social democrats,” they explained,
were “not laissez-faire neo-liberals,” because they believed in “an
(^35) Tony Blair and Gerhard Schro ̈der, “Europe: The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte,”
Appendix in Bodo Hombach,The Politics of the New Centre, Cambridge,
Polity Press, 2000, pp. 159–62.
(^36) Ibid., pp. 163–65.
176 Left and Right in Global Politics