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Per Wirtén
We need to be advocates of social liberalism as well as equality.
Once again social democracy seems marginalised in European politics. In some of the larger countries - such as Germany, France and the UK - the situation is more or less catastrophic, with parties that lack support and relevant policies on almost all the important issues of the day. Blaming the Third Way for this state of affairs has become a fashionable response. However, such a position is neither politically nor intellectually viable. I would instead suggest that a more historically grounded interpretation of the Third Way offers an alternative framework for understanding today's problem, alongside a critical assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, its failures and (still) interesting potential.
When the third way took centre stage, the situation for the left was even bleaker than today. There was almost a consensus that socialism and social democracy had no future as a political force, and that the different parties were unfit to govern. No creative, dynamic or forward-looking debates were in sight. However, New Labour, and books by Anthony Giddens, Will Hutton and many others, as well as the different movements for global justice that later came together in the World Social Forums, infused new life to this presumed-dead body.
We have to return to the spirit of productive contradictions and creative differences that made the early years of the Third Way such a vibrant time. In fact the outlook for a rejuvenation of that kind of atmosphere is not bad. Today social democracy is no longer bound to just one dominant party in each country. Thanks to the Greens and different left-wing socialist parties - all of them now partners of growing importance in the wider social-democratic movement of ideas - pluralism on the left is much stronger now than it was in the early 1990s.
One of the most obvious flaws of the third way was, of course, its focus on poverty reduction, in combination with a complete neglect of the necessary renewal of a politics for equality. The most inspiring book I have read on politics this year is The Spirit Level by Kate Picketts and Richard Wilkinson. The subtitle of the book says it all: Why more equal societies almost always do better. Leaving ideological and moral passions aside, they very effectively argue that equality is not an issue that belongs to the past. A politics for equality differs from a politics that focuses solely on poverty-reduction in the important sense that it takes on board that government has to address not just the poor but also the super rich.
It is crucial that we free ourselves from a crippling lack of confidence in our ability to find new instruments for reducing the wealth of the super rich, and to create a more sustainable and equal society. We need instruments - chief among them taxes - that can be used effectively to ensure such balance, and, not least, to find acceptance among our citizens.
A European political perspective invests the idea of equality with a new and urgent actuality. With open borders within the Union, the huge gap in income between the rich and poor regions will generate real problems, potentially threatening the destabilisation of the entire European political project. On this question the paper 'Maastricht 2042 and the Fate of Europe', by the American economist James K. Galbraith (published by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Berlin), was an eye-opener when I first read it a few years ago.
On this point we clearly have to step away from the legacy of the Third Way. However, there is another political area, of equal importance, where the Third Way opened up relevant new possibilities; and that is in its liberalism. I don't mean by this the uncritical economic liberalism that was one of its more serious flaws, but liberalism as in personal integrity, freedom, open borders, cosmopolitan multiculturalism, individual rights, and an uncompromising critique of both the centralising state and the drive by big business to control our lives as consumers and workers.
In Sweden we now have a very peculiar situation whereby the two parties that most strongly advocate this form of rights-based liberalism are the Green Party and the Left Party (the former communists!). On these issues they now represent classic radical liberal values, while the old liberal party (Folkpartiet) has completely left them to one side, to concentrate on economic liberalism. We can probably see the same tendency all over Europe.
I have identified here two pillars for the achievement of a renewed social democracy. The first is the classical social-democratic one: policies for more equal societies and sustainable realistic welfare systems. The second is the liberal pillar, as outlined above. In short, I believe the future for the left is to be found in a compromise between these two traditions of emancipation.
Per Wirtén is co-founder and editor in chief for Arena in Stockholm, Sweden. He is author of several books, of which the most recent is Kosmopolitik nu!, published earlier this year. Arena is part of the independent and progressive Arenagruppen in Stockholm, a non-profit organisation that publishes books and a daily editorial page on the web, and arranges seminars and other political and cultural activities. www.arenagruppen.se.
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