A history of the term ‘Third Way’

“It’s not left, nor right, but forward.”

Andrew Yang campaign slogan

Simply put, the term “Third Way” in politics has been commonly used to denote a position said to be either a mediation or simply a distinction from two sharply opposing political ideologies. For this reason, there are many times, particularly during the 20th century where the term “third Way” was used to describe an ideology or framework that is supposedly novel and better than the two contrasting ideologies it competes with.

• Democratic socialism during the Cold War, especially as practiced by Chile’s Salvador Allende and France’s Francois Mitterand, often declared itself as a ‘third way’ between capitalism and communism. Ironically, France and Chile were affiliated to differing blocs – France is a NATO power, and Chile under Allende hovered closely to the socialist bloc.
• ‘Ordoliberalism’, a sort of German proto-neoliberalism which emphasized the state maintaining a proper environment for competition in a market-based economy, and actively seeks to prevent the emergence of cartels and monopolies. Some ‘ordoliberals’ had even used these principles in pursuit of their idea of social justice – anticipating ‘left’-TINAism and New Labour by about half a century. Wikipedia brings a definition describing it as a third way between Classical liberalism and collectivism, but the ‘ordoliberals’ were really a reaction to Nazism, which is not all that collectivist. Having gone through the Weimar system and Nazism, the ‘ordoliberals’ decided on an economic system which was opposed to the welfare state, yet saw the state intervene to maintain price stability.
• Fascism was seen as a ‘third way’ alternative to capitalism and Bolshevism – both of which undermined the “volk”, or the “nation” as fascists generally put it. For Mussolini, fascism represented an age where the demand of politics that demanded a ‘rational order’ i.e. liberalism, parliamentary democracy, communism etc. had been exhausted. German fascism – or Nazism, was overtly racist and eliminationist, as seen its “racial hygiene” and sterilization programs targeted at people with various physical and mental disabilities, and sexual minorities. Even so, fascism seeks both to create a binding national politic with a ‘national myth’ to weave social ties, but also to construct sharp social hierachies and a social and cultural purity to in the name of maintaining national strength. So racial and sexual minorities, and foreigners are likely to be targeted by the policies of fascist societies. Fascism while appropriating many concepts from socialist movements (workers’ struggle, vanguardism in some cases, etc.), it maintains the existence of private property – indeed, Fascism comes to power with the support of major capitalists. In fascist corporatism, heads of private industry determine working conditions, prices, working hours, etc. while independent workers’ organisations cease to exist without input from the State in these matters. The State subordinates both the private sphere and civil society to its function.
  • See also: ‘fascism is capitalism in decay’, Was fascism ‘rational’?

• ‘Yugoslav socialism’ or “socialist workers’ self-management” was a system adopted by the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and described as a ‘third way’ between Western capitalism and the Soviet socialism – including the Eastern Bloc. It implemented socially-owned cooperatives – allowing the workforce control over various aspects of production and decision-making within the enterprise, under a market-oriented system subject to increasing liberalisation over the decades – particularly after the death of Josip Broz Tito. Implemented in the 1950s and lasting until the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1992, its emergence was the consequence of Tito’s defiance of Stalin over the geopolitical situation of the Balkans*, souring relations between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and culminating in Communist Party of Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform. Yugoslavia had beforehand maintained a command economy consistent with the communist governments at the time, but following the split, the party leadership pursued an economic approach that in their eyes eschewed bureaucracy, emphasized self-management and instilled discipline into the workforce. Markets were allowed on the basis that Yugoslavia sought to have enough capital accumulation to trade with the West and have access to its markets in light of the cooling of relations with the Soviets. These relations somewhat improved in the mid-1950s after Stalin’s death, but Yugoslavia was insistent on pursuing its own way to socialism. As for the West, Yugoslavia began to accept more foreign capital from the US, to build its infrastructure under a set of conditions demanding greater market liberalisation. The most standout example was the IMF package given in 1983, which made demands so stringent that the country was unable to access credit to its own central bank and fell into austerity and then a recession. Other loans from the IMF finally led to internal tensions between the constituent republics and, well…balkanisation entering the 1990s – with the violent breakup lasting a decade. As far as systems go, this was one of the better Third Ways, in my opinion. Czechoslovakia was also beginning to attempt a similar approach to the “socialist worker’s self management”, only to be shut down by the Soviets invading it, justified by accusing the country of deviating from Marxism-Leninism and violating the Warsaw Pact; the example of Czechoslovakia in particular is subject to liberal maudlin nonsense due to the popular slogans used in this period**.
  • See also: Socialist Yugoslavia, socialist workers’ self-management
• Third World socialism presented itself as an alternative to capitalism and communism. This approach was coloured by the independence movements and decolonialisation process taking place across what would become the Third World. Much of the Cold War was fought for the influence of these territories – The US now presented itself as promoting freedom and democracy with imperialism increasingly seen in a negative light on the international stage***, while the Soviet Union presented itself as an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial force – even as it itself was accused of imperialism by the West and later China and Albania****, providing assistance on many occassions to the newly independent Third World nations on several fronts. Many Third World nations sought to pursue an independent line from competing sides of the Cold War, notably culminating in the Non-Aligned Movement, but otherwise found themselves closely drawn to one faction over the other (though that was also dependent on the period), and even in some cases – tried to play the Americans and Soviets off against each other. The countries that chose to implement socialism were drawn in closer relations to the Soviet Union or at least accused of being all but satellites, and found themselves targeted by the Western powers – especially the US, in various destabilisation plots and attempted coups. Third World socialism had had sub-categories within it such as Arab socialism (Ba’athism), African socialism, Asian socialism, Melanesian socialism, Islamic socialism, Buddhist socialism, and more. In the 1960s and 1970s, they were characterised by their developmentalist economic policies – a protectionist framework with high tarriffs on imports and high concentration on internal markets of domestic products. Many of the nations which implemented this model seemed to grow wise that developmentalism was convenient for the West, in that it dictated a program consistent with the historical-social practices in Europe and the US – attempts to pursue an independent model were stymied by coups, invasions or even changes in direction in national and foreign policy. The collapse of the Bretton-Woods System in 1971, resultant debt crisis of 1980s in several Latin American countries, and the deployment of IMF-proposed “structural adjustments” ensured that various aspects of Third World socialism were stillborn, surviving mostly in South East Asian “actually existing socialism”, Cuba and the “Pink tide” in Latin America. Many advocates of this approach believe that the greatest impediment to its remergence is unipolarity in the form of American hegemony, and are supportive of America’s imperial decline/the emergence of rival great powers to recreate a multipolar world. That said, the reason why Third World socialism lasted as long as it did is because of the presence of a socialist bloc. Even assuming that it is still socialist, whatever bloc China exists in will not be anti- or even non-capitalist. China has also been at best, non-committal (and even adversarial) to various liberation struggles and socialist projects across the world since the 1970s. It is unlikely to change this trajectory after pursuing it for 50 years****.
  • See also: Third World, Non-Aligned Movement, 1955 Bandung Conference, Nehru and China, Nkrumahism, African socialism, Socialism and the Arab world, Ba’athism, Socialist feminism and the third world, Pink tide

• Muammar Gaddafi of Libya formalised and endorsed a version of Third World socialism he explicitly called “The Third Way” or “The Third International Theory”, contrasting it with liberal democracy and Soviet Marxism; and drawing upon Islamic socialism, pan-Africanism, Yugoslav socialism, and the Three Worlds Theory promoted by Mao Zedong in the mid-1970s as influences. Gaddafi eschewed representative democracy – comparing it to the struggles of tribes of clans, in favour of direct popular democracy through people’s congresses. For Gaddafi, socialism was a matter of pursuing social and economic justice and in the Green Book – he proposed that workers should control the enterprises in which they work in, that private property should be eliminated, that living in a domicile made it yours, and that the surplus wealth should be put to the good of society. Libya was and is an oil-rich country, and so Gaddafi supplied oil exports to the West to fund his social welfare policies, urban development projects, and to build his national army. Libya received sanctions in relation to the Pan Am 103 airline bombing over Lockerbie, United Kingdom (Scotland) in 1988 and its refusal to hand over the alleged culprits. The result was Libya’s gradual economic decline. In the 2000s, Gaddafi pressed for a rapprochement with the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush in light of the War on Terror, allowing UN inspectors into Libya for WMDs, and signing a deal to allow BP to operate in Libya. Whatever worth Gaddafi’s latest iteration of the “Third Way” still had for Libya as a national ideology, it had ceased having any promise for anti-imperialism. Gaddafi himself switched from calling for Palestinian liberation, to calling Palestinian nationalism as false as Zionism. Upon the 2011 Libyan civil war, and Gaddafi’s death, Libya removed Gaddafi’s “Third International Theory” as its guiding ideology.
  • See also: Muammar Gaddafi, The Green Book, Libya under Gaddafi

• Finally, the contemporary expression of the “third way” in politics is…the “Third Way”. The “Third Way” has the distinction in the fact that it self-consciously calls itself the Third Way other than ‘Third International Theory’, ‘ordoliberalism’, ‘socialist worker’s self-management’ and what have you. Drawing from the ‘risk society’ sociological model of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, Third Way politics came at a fascinating time, with somewhat millenarian proclamations such as ‘the end of history’ and ‘the end of ideology’ that were made following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Giddens did not subscribe to either belief, but noted that modernity had changed significantly – and believed that globalisation was creating a new kind of citizen – conscious of their place in the world, and of global affairs, and of the worldwide problems that demand attention by international institutions e.g. climate change, environmental disasters by new technologies like nuclear power, etc. For Giddens, this meant that the ‘old forms of organising’ (such as trade unions) and large-scale transformation through social programs initiated by centralised state management (which Giddens identified in what he called “old-style social democracy”) were obsolete. The Third Way was advertised as bypassing the ‘old Left’ and the ‘new Right’ for a viable centre. More explicitly, it supposed a space between social democracy and neoliberalism for centre-left politics to occupy. The Third Way is identified with New Labour and the New Democrats – with cross-pollination between both parties in terms of political strategy, though much of the groundwork had been laid out by the Australian Labor Party leadership, specifically the governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating between 1983 to 1996 – which loosened economic tariffs, issued deregulation, and held anti-union legislation. Blair and Clinton – two Third Way politicians who were leaders at the same period were characterised increasingly by personality-driven politics (all the more startling with the former since the UK until Thatcher repudiated a “presidential style” to the premiership). They explicitly rejected what they regarded as “the old-style politics” which for Blair meant the union influence in the Labour Party*****, and Clinton repudiated the unions and various coalition organisations. Third Way politics for the ‘centre-left’ that practices it, is a concession to or a belief in the free market as the best determinant of resource allocation. It means stringent anti-union laws by the parties of labour, it means a ho-hum attitude to deindustrialisation in many former industrial strongholds, welfare-to-work schemes advertised as Clinton put it “a hand-up, not a handout” and punishes those who “don’t hold up their end” among the unemployed, and what social welfare programs it does do are funded by public-private ‘partnerships’ – an incursion into the public sphere by private companies until the social services are hollowed out and privatised. For democratic socialists or more ‘earnest’ social democrats, Third Way ironically represents the ultimate betrayal – despite themselves historically positioning themselves as a ‘third way’. Revolutionary socialists regard this kind of politics as the logical conclusion of the former pursuits under capitalism – which they insist cannot be managed, certainly not for very long. After the global recession of 2007-9, Third Way politics went into sharp decline. There’s been a lot of curious talk around “polarization”, “populism”, and such since then from the commentariat which speaks a lot on the sort of cultural mores set in when this kind of politics was dominant. The only one earnestly pursuing it is France’s Emmanuel Macron who practically boasts his centrism. Anthony Giddens himself had criticised New Labour on various matters, such as its reliance on spin, its inability to tackle irresponsible businesses or curb massive pay-offs to leaving boardroom executives of collapsing firms. In the 2000s, there was something of an academic debate (and revived in the late 2010s among commentators comparing it to the Corbyn leadership) as to whether New Labour was really neoliberal – these people apparently thought that neoliberalism was something that Conservatives did – rather than a globalised process in the current era of capitalism, and won’t concieve of a left or centre-left party or leadership advocating neoliberal policies. Leftists generally do not have such illusions, and have over a century of experiencing (or claiming) betrayals and concessions to hold on to such naive notions. For those at home or abroad: yes. New Labour was neoliberal. We can’t understand what New Labour was trying to do, and why it did the things that it did without this understanding, or why Margaret Thatcher when asked what her greatest achievement was, replied “New Labour”. A not mentioned feature of Third Wayism in practice that isn’t mentioned very much is their advocacy of hard borders – which runs up against their projected liberal universalism. A manifestation of this leads to the promotion of anti-immigrant rhetoric, and an opportunistic championing of nationalism, undermining the “culturally liberal, fiscally conservative” adage. If Third Wayism is anything, its triangulation writ large – given the pretence of an ideology.
  • See also: Third Way, The Third Way: A Renewal of Social Democracy, New Labour, New Democrats, Anthony Giddens, risk society, ‘progressive-neoliberalism’

So there you have it. A history of “third ways”. Not included is Trotskyism presenting itself as a third way between capitalism and Stalinism. Maoism as a ‘third way’ from the capitalist world and Soviet revisionism, the New Left a ‘third way’ between labourism and Stalinism, Keynesianism as a “third way” between lassez-faire capitalism and socialism, Harold Macmillian’s “middle ground” between capitalism and socialism (really social democracy), and so on. So what is to be learned? Well, that so-called “third ways” rarely last long, and that it’s really, really hard to distinguish a position as “different” from opposing ideas – especially if they’re still integrated in this “third way” project. A lot of this stuff has been earnest, but a lot more had been outright opportunistic.

Notes:

*- This ‘Balkans situation’ was Tito sending armed support to the Communist Party of Greece and the partisans of Albania, and pursuing a pan-Balkan unification project – going as far as to set up military airbases in Albania. This frustrated Stalin due to the detente he held with the other (read:capitalist) Allied forces promising that he would not support revolution by communists (he also felt it impractical to allow sole CPs control due to their marginality over them joining forces with bourgeois nationalists), and in particular the secret deal he set up with Winston Churchill to effectively to split Yugoslavia in two. There was also the fact that the Soviet Union treated the other newly socialist states less as brother socialist nations and more as satellites. Tito’s pursuits in forming partnerships with other Balkan nations like Hungary took place behind the backs of the Soviets on many occasions, and even ignored their calls to moderate the process. In other words, this was Balkan nationalism (specifically a Yugoslav-dominant version) clashing with the realpolitik between the powers of the disintegrating alliance between the UK, US, France & the Soviet Union, particularly the Soviet hegemony over the Eastern Bloc. The result was this plan for a Balkan federation going up in smoke. Enver Hoxha, leader of Albania, while initially receptive to the merging of Yugoslavia with Albania – changed his position, in part due to loyalty to Stalin, but also more importantly – he felt that that the Albanians were being deliberately stunted and subordinated to the Yugoslavians. Once the split between Tito and Stalin became irreconcilable, Hoxha denounced Tito as a revisionist, and continued to do so until his death. The leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia purged members suspected of being pro-Stalin or ‘Cominformists’ in response – many of the alleged ending up imprisoned, exiled or killed.

**- As shitty as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was, if the example of Yugoslavia is anything to go by, then the western capitalist institutions would only be too happy to “assist” in the project that Alexander Dubcek was pursuing through its structural adjustment loans, and perhaps starting early the hideousness and misery that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. That said, both the slogan “socialism with a human face”, and the appearance of tanks from the Soviets to ‘correct’ Czechoslovak errors only served to harm communism as a global force more than CPCz could have done if left to his own devices. This is exactly why liberals romanticise his image and that of the Prague Spring specifically because it failed. No one was giving Nguyen Van Linh any humanist awards.

***-It can be said that the Second World War did quite a lot to discredit the idea that empires are good, having them is ‘normal’ for strong countries, and any talk about its supposed benefits to the colonies. So, imperialist countries simply stopped talking about that stuff. After the war saw the rise of universal humanism as a project, and decolonisation came at a peculiar time in light of these developments. For instance, the United States, if it was going to present itself as a beacon for freedom and democracy, had to improve its human rights and address the Civil Rights Movement. It also sought to improve relations in the developing world setting up agencies like the Peace Corps, yet it was organisations like it that were used as clear examples of the US’ neocolonial intentions.

****- The Sino-Soviet split drew accusations from China that the Soviet Union had become social-imperialist (“socialist in name, imperialist in character”) and a threat to world peace worse than the United States. Hidden beneath the accusations of revisionism and counter-accusations of adventurism were disputes over foreign policy, national security, global and regional influence, and boundaries (China challenged the Soviet Union over some of the territory of its borders, and was also incensed when the latter supported India during its border skirmishes in 1962) and determining the direction of the global communist movement and which power was more relevant. The Soviet Union initiating ‘de-Stalinization’ presented a problem on two fronts – firstly because of how the Soviets treated other socialist states as subordinate to them, and also because it presented Stalin’s contributions to Leninism as a great error – something that wouldn’t wash with Mao if he was to present himself as the inheritor, foremost developer and new theoretical head of Marxist-Leninist practice. China was also displeased with the “peaceful coexistence” with capitalism about-turn, since it implied the notion that Marxism-Leninism; “Marxism in the age of imperialism” is incorrect, or needed correcting on the point of imperialism as it existed in the modern world, and how to respond to it. Hoxha echoed many of the critiques Mao made of the Soviet leadership, and these critiques themselves also partially hid an anxiety around Albania’s national security – fearing a possible invasion from Yugoslavia and a Soviet Union shifting its own foreign policy significantly enough to ignore it. In any case, Maoism as it synthesized into a coherent ideology (a process that would not be formally completed until the 1980s) around the world echoed China’s charges against the Soviet Union as social-imperialist and the “Soviet bloc” as neocolonial puppets of the Soviet Union, and indeed, many Maoists to this day uphold this charge. In a lot of important ways, this had brought importance to Maoism and its revolutionary potential and influence in the iterations of Third World socialism. However, China’s influential role in world revolution would not last. The accusation of ‘Soviet social-imperialism’ also coincided with the West’s own accusations of the Soviet Union as imperialist, and was still upheld even after China initiated relations with the United States in 1972 (which in turn dissolved China’s own curiously warm relations with Albania), implying that the charge was largely – perhaps mostly over China’s national interests conflicting with the Soviet Union’s, or at least it had increasingly came to define it. The subsequent note will explain a bit more of this in detail.

*****- China’s foreign policy in the 1970s during and after the process of normalisation of relations with the United States took an…unusual turn, hedging closely to the United States’ own in some cases, and mostly acted out to spite the Soviet Union, than to challenge imperialism. Rather than support the Bangladesh liberation movement, it instead sided with the Pakistani military junta mostly due to its long-standing positive relations with Pakistan. The consequence was that China wouldn’t recognise the state of Bangladesh until 1975. It was also among the first to recognise the government of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, just after the coup that collapsed Allende’s social democratic government and refused to open its embassy to dissidents of the Pinochet government, it supported the right-wing and apartheid South Africa- backed UNITA forces against the MPLA forces supported by the Soviet Union in Angola, supported and continues to support Israel over Palestinian liberation, supported the Khmer Rouge as the Soviets backed Vietnam, fought its own war against Vietnam, and supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets. The period was a reckoning for international communism as it became clear that China was not interested any longer in supporting Third World liberation struggles and world revolution seemed impossible. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 brought home how easily the Communist Party of China could lose power, Deng Xiaoping met with Mikhail Gorbachev to normalise relations between China and the Soviet Union in 1989…on the eve of its collapse. The point is, part of what allowed room for China to behave in this manner is the existing of a socialist bloc what it sought to place itself as the centre of, but that socialist bloc is gone – only outposts are left. China, having accepted market reforms in an era of globalisation had given it less incentive to support revolutionary movements, what China has been doing is using trade that happened to support whatever development programs nations in the Global South were undertaking: this had remarkable benefits for the “Pink tide” governments in 2000s. China’s Belt and Road initiative is seen as a possibility for the Global South to pursue developmental programs with the money from Chinese loans. Whereas the aim to make itself the centre of global socialism failed, its current aim to become central to global trade would at the very least push it to superpower status. The promise of a developmentalism without the strings attached by Western imperialism, or at it is often argued – without China dictating the process – is an alluring one for many contemporary anti-imperialists especially in the Third World, and the creation of a China-led power bloc for these nations in the Global South to join – establishing multipolarity is the last, or the best chance to disrupt Western imperialism following the end of the Cold War. That said, we return again to the absence of the socialist bloc, and more importantly, to the fact that this view appears to underplay class conflict in favour of geopolitical alliances. Even for liberals, observing Latin American politics for example – persistent interference with its politics by the West led to “Pink tide” projects undermined and its leaders overthrown, in place of neoliberal lackeys. The ‘great hope’ for China’s rise and multipolarity is that a new progressive developmentalism can rise, but doing so requires that these countries pursue even so much as a social democratic/progressive-nationalist system, which social democratic or progressive-nationalist governments need to be in place for this to even happen (or the right-wing or centrist governments would have to identify how the policies of the previous government are in their national interest). And in light of the Russia-Ukraine war, consolidation of this bloc came with greater urgency in light of the US’ tug-of-war with China for currency domination. I hope the reader can see why I find this optimism for multipolarity to be a little misguided.

******- That said, as sharp as New Labour’s, particularly Tony Blair’s conflict with the trade unions were, which at one point after Blair’s characterisation of them as “conservatives” opposing his privatisation policies with even GMB of all unions, openly adversarial to New Labour, the grumblings of the party loyalists – even Blair loyalists, never led to a serious consideration of severing the Party’s links to them. They understood that even the ‘high value’ donors like David Sainsbury, Rupert Murdoch and Alan Sugar couldn’t replace the money coming in from the unions. Neo-Blairite posturing from acolytes of the Starmer leadership (naturally immune to “name and shame” by our pliant press) intimating severing the union connection will unlikely lead to anything serious.

See also:

• end of history
• Third Way
• Centrism