What could be more embarrassing for Anthony Giddens than the recent news about the French presidential election?
His "third way" theory of transcending left and right won wide attention after the election victory of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party in 1997.
In 1999, Blair, then US president Bill Clinton and the "New Left" leaders from the EU held a "third way" summit in Florence, Italy, and tried to set a global mainstream political keynote for the 21th century.
Who would have known that one of the leaders who attended that summit -- French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin -- would be trounced in the first round of France's presidential elections last Sunday.
The man who tripped Jospin was Jean-Marie Le Pen of the ultra-right National Front party. Le Pen will face off against President Jacques Chirac in the second round. This development is changing the positions of the left and right in the second round and the "third way" leftists will be dramatically forced out of this showdown.
It's interesting to ask how an anti-immigrant, xenophobic platform has managed to resonate among voters in a country with a deep tradition of democracy.
Since the early 1990s, the Maastricht Treaty for European monetary integration has provided fertile ground for extreme right-wing groups.
In light of the need to build strong credibility for the euro, the Maastricht Treaty demands member states to abide by stringent financial standards. Such rules forced many European countries with social security traditions to drastically cut down their welfare spending, causing the general public to get bogged down in material deprivation and insecurity.
Under these circumstances, ultra-right-wing groups are the only ones willing to "uphold justice for victims." Only the ultra-right-wing groups grasped the political grassroots character of "loving and being together with the people."
Even though Jospin replaced Chirac's favorite, Alain Juppe, in the 1997 parliamentary elections and once again started left-right "cohabitation," a close observation showed that Le Pen was still the man of the hour.
With the trial issue of the euro pending at the time, the National Front both criticized the sins of globalization and lashed out at the un-democratic-ness and wastefulness of the gigantic European Council. All of the National Front's platforms ran counter to the new consensus reached by the mainstream left and right.
By 1998, the parties of the "pan-third way" had generally won the leadership role back from the neo-liberal-right across the EU.
However, the policies of the "third way" parties were not very different from the guidelines of the neo-liberals. The issue of resource redistribution was once again dropped ever so gently. This led to the largest rich-poor gap in the UK, the birthplace of the "third way," since the end of World War II.
The situation was also similar in Germany, where Oskar La Fontaine, a Social Democrat, quickly ended his Cabinet stint under Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder.
When Austria's neo-Nazis made their way into the Cabinet through elections in early 2000, it was a forewarning of the upcoming harvest by France's National Front.
What really transcends left and right, therefore, is not Giddens' "third way," but the extreme right. They are the ones "executing justice on behalf of the heavens" by way of identity politics. They are the only true "third way" messengers of the present age.
If President Chen Shui-bian (
Even though the "New Middle Way" swears that it transcends ethnic politics, "striving to improve the economy" is actually its only platform.
The plight of the people not only hasn't been abated -- on the contrary, enterprises have repeatedly received tax breaks, with social injustices only becoming increasingly serious.
From this perspective, the TSU's expansive power cannot be ignored.
In the gaps of the "New Middle Way," actions like proposing an amendment that would require presidential and vice presidential candidates to be born in Taiwan, and opposing the exodus of eight-inch wafer plants to China both struck a strong chord with those who had been marginalized in society. It incorporated their feelings of resentment and used them as "Taiwanese consciousness."
Because of this, rather than missing the point and guessing about the on-off relationship between former president Lee Teng-hui (
Wu Ting-feng is a doctoral candidate studying sociology at Tunghai University.
Translated by Francis Huang
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