Where Now for European Social Democracy? - Policy Network

PATRICK DIAMOND 37ideological, are ever-present, as a period of revisionism andenlightenment in the 1990s risks giving way to the familiar chorus ofheresy and betrayal today.Refreshing the Third WayA second dilemma relates to the specifically Anglo-American socialdemocratic reform project of the third way. Again, there is a dangerthat in regarding this project as the only catalyst of policy‘modernisation’, those who advance the third way forget that it tooneeds to be revised. They become by implication ‘old’ New Labour.The third way as envisaged by President Clinton in the mid-1990s wasrooted in a politics of aspiration – how to appeal to those groups in thelower middle and working-class, famously termed ‘the ReaganDemocrats’, who became alienated from the Left in the early 1970s.However, the dominant force in the economy and society today is oneof pervasive insecurity.The economism and futurism implicit in the third way in fact servesto undermine the revisionist approach since it implies that history hasan ultimate, fixed destination. Yet there are always new frontiers tobe conquered. The historian Larry Siedentop shows in ‘Democracy inEurope’ that the tendency to reduce politics to a solely economicmatter, a strong disposition in much of Britain and the US, carries gravedangers 12 . Equally, we should be alive to the threat of futurism – thenotion fundamental to Thatcherism that we know what the future isgoing to be; we have no choice but to embrace it; and those who graspthe future are entitled by virtue of their superior insight to lead therest of us towards it.Fatalism is the enemy of the revisionist approach. Fundamentally,if global capitalism and its forces conquer all before them, how canpolitics have an ethical dimension any longer? This mentalityexacerbates cynicism and corrodes trust in public institutions bydisqualifying any scope for moral argument. The underlyingassumptions of the third way project therefore need to be re-visited.New thinking should be rooted in a broader and more coherent politicalnarrative that is unambiguously couched in the values of the Left.