active state” whose “top priority” was “investment in human and
social capital.”^37
Anthony Giddens, who was a close advisor to Tony Blair and cer-
tainly the most prominent advocate of the Third Way, similarly dif-
ferentiated this new vision from both “classical” social democracy and
neoliberalism. Classical social-democracy, Giddens wrote, favored
a strong state, a mixed economy, Keynesian demand management,
full employment, comprehensive welfare programs, egalitarianism,
and internationalism in the context of a bipolar world. Neoliberalism,
on the other hand, privileged a minimal state, unrestricted markets,
monetarism, price stability, a welfare state acting merely as a “safety
net,” less egalitarian objectives, and a nationalist and realist stance
in a still bipolar world. Breaking with these antinomies, Third Way
politics proposed instead a more democratic state relying on an active
civil society, a new mixed economy of state-society and private-public
partnerships, a notion of equality centered on social inclusion, a welfare
state understood as a social investment instrument, and a more cosmo-
politan view of the world.^38 It remained unclear, however, what
exactly would be the distinctive macro-economic policy of the Third
Way. The focus was more general, and referred to a less interven-
tionist state, which would conceive its expenditures as social invest-
ments and seek to facilitate the inclusion of all citizens in the market
economy.
Not surprisingly, many on the left considered that Third Way
advocates and politicians were basically a kinder and gentler sort of
neoliberal. Few critics put the matter as bluntly as Oskar Lafontaine,
who was Schro ̈der’s rival in the German social-democratic party and
his finance minister until he quit in March 1999. In the book he
published after his resignation –Das Herz schla ̈gt links(The Heart
Beats to the Left) – Lafontaine stated that “the Third Way was no way
at all” (“Der dritte Weg ist ein Holzweg”).^39 In the same vein, British
political scientist Mark Wickham-Jones contended that Blair’s Third
Way discourse amounted to an “abandonment of social democracy”
(^37) Ibid., p. 169.
(^38) Anthony Giddens,The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy,
Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998, pp. 7–8 and 70.
(^39) Oskar Lafontaine (1999), quoted in Giddens,The Third Way and Its Critics,
p. 14; Mark Leonard, “Introduction,” in Hombach,The Politics of the New
Centre, pp. xxv–xxvii.
Twenty-first-century rapprochement 177