to bridge the long-standing gap between the views defended by the
global financial institutions and those of the United Nations.
The rapprochement, however, soon showed its limits. In global
politics, it never erased the enduring and numerous differences between
the left and the right over globalization, growth, inequality, and the
governance of development. The UN agencies continued to be critical
of a world that remained profoundly and increasingly unequal, while
the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO remained confident that
the international system was heading in the right direction and could
become more equitable with good policies and modest reforms. In
domestic politics, Third Way discourses gradually gave way to more
classical assertions of social-democratic values, as the right came back
to power in most of the Western world in the beginning of the 2000s,
and as the left was reaffirming its strength in Latin America and in
other countries of the South.
Systematic studies of party programs in Western democracies
between the Second World War and the end of the twentieth century
show the remarkable stability of the left–right division over time and
across space. In English-speaking democracies, there was a rightward
shift of all parties in the 1980s, but the gap between the left and the
right moved along, so that the distance between the two sides remained
about the same; in continental Europe, this general shift to the right
did not even take place.^108 Interestingly, European Union politics
itself was defined and paced by the politics of left and right, as both
intergovernmental relations and European elections reflected the
relative strength of conservatives and social-democrats in member
states.^109 Everything else being equal, parties of the left always spent
(^108) Ian Budge and Michael D. McDonald, “Election and Party System Effects on
Policy Representation: Bringing Time into a Comparative Perspective,”
Electoral Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, March 2007, 168–79, p. 171; Torben Iversen,
“Class Politics is Dead! Long Live Class Politics! A Political Economy
Perspective on the New Partisan Politics,”APSA–CP Newsletter(American
Political Science Association Comparative Politics Newsletter), vol. 17, no. 2,
109 Summer 2006, 1–6, pp. 2–3.
Manow, Scha ̈fer and Zorn, “European Social Policy and Europe’s
Party-Political Center of Gravity,” p. 32–33; Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks,
and Carole J. Wilson, “Does Left/Right Structure Party Positions on European
Integration?,” in Gary Marks and Marco R. Steenbergen (eds.),European
Integration and Political Conflict, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 121;
Daniele Caramani, “Is There a European Electorate and What Does It Look
196 Left and Right in Global Politics