The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy.

• Author: Kaye, Harvey J.

The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy by Anthony Giddens Polity Press/Blackwell Publishers. 166 pages. $19.95.

After twenty years of New Right ascendance in Europe, voters in the past two years returned the parties of the left to power: Labour in Britain, the Socialists in France, and the Social Democrats, in coalition with the Greens, in Germany.

Unfortunately, these leftist victories do not represent the reemergence of class politics in Europe. The new governments are not attempting to subordinate the interests of capital to the public good and the needs of working people.

The left's electoral victories reflected a growing popular rejection of policies favoring corporate priorities and market rule. Nevertheless, we should not soon expect to hear calls for "power to the people" from today's Euro-left leaders, especially Britain's Tony Blair and Germany's Gerhard Schroder, who represent a dramatic break from their parties' ideological past. This departure goes by the trendy name "the Third Way" and is the title of Anthony Giddens's new book.

Rarely used with any precision, "the Third Way" basically refers to a politics and governing vision that is supposed to differ from both the market fundamentalism of the right and the statism of the socialist tradition. The term originated on this side of the Atlantic. Clinton campaign consultant Dick Morris has recounted how, in the wake of the Republican triumphs in the 1994 Congressional elections, he advised the President to "triangulate, create a third position, not just in between the old positions of the two parties, but above them, as well." Morris claims he suggested "triangulation as a to change, not abandon, the Democratic Party." So Clinton began to speak of having discovered a "Third Way" for government: neither Reagan Republicanism nor New Deal/Great Society liberalism.

Clinton didn't have to go very far to distance himself from liberalism, since he ran in 1992 as a New Democrat eager to execute people and "end welfare as we know it." And those weren't just campaign slogans; he actually followed through on them. Since his signing of the so-called Welfare Reform Act in 1996, it's been hard to tell how his Third Way fundamentally differs from the Republican way. Meanwhile, his supporters in the Democratic Leadership Council, the business-oriented right wing of the party, have taken to touting the Third Way as a "progressive global political movement" attuned to the "new challenges...