After the Third Way, where next? Anthony Browne in Budapest.
The diminished ranks of the Centre Left are stumbling on their quest for a new agenda, writes Anthony Browne in Budapest
In a former Habsburg royal palace, all Corinthian columns and golden statues of Greek goddesses, besuited delegates from five continents plot the future of the world. Their aim is to control the global political agenda for the next decade.
One enthuses about the "tremendous opportunities of globalisation". Another complains of American protectionism. US politicians want to put up barriers to free trade to save jobs. A third boasts of providing the "largest tax cut in our nation's history".
The guest of honour bemoans the past influence in his country of a "statedominated inefficient economy; a tradition of populace glumly accepting whatever the government dished out". He then outlines a future in which "everything has to be flexible, adaptable and intelligent".
In the glossy conference brochure the pictures of the 14 authors stare out: all men, all white, almost all middle-aged.
What is this shadowy gathering of a global elite? The bloated executives of multinational corporations? Power-crazed US neoconservatives? The venomous fringe of the European far Right?
Hardly. It is actually the annual gathering of the "leading politicians, intellectuals and policymakers from the progressive Centre Left".
The Progressive Governance Budapest 2004 conference is organised by the Policy Network think-tank chaired by Peter Mandelson, the new Labour guru and newly appointed European Commissioner for Trade.
The host is Ferenc Gyurcsany, the supposedly left-wing Prime Minister of Hungary, a multi-millionaire property developer whose Government is engaged in such a feverish privatisation that the supposedly right-wing Opposition is demanding a referendum to bring it to a halt. "We're building an agenda for the next ten years," said Michiel van Hulten, the co-chairman of the Policy Network and rising star of the Dutch Labour Party. "People point to the neocons in America who put together a coherent set of ideas. The point is to develop a common agenda. We have shared values. We know we do. But we don't have shared ideas."
Or, as Tony Blair observed: "To put it bluntly, how can progressive politics win?"
The annual meeting of the left-wing leaders was initiated by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroder, the German Chancellor, in 1999 when they held a "wonkathon" to forge the "Third Way" in politics.
The Third Way was the Left's answer to the "crisis of Keynesianism" which afflicted the West in the 1970s, and the free- market "neoliberalism" of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s. It was designed to forge a middle way between the "tax and spend" state control and regulation of the old Left, and the subsequent "free- market fundamentalism" that insisted that the market always knows best.
The Third Way shifted the role of the State from protecting people to enabling them, from being a net to a ladder. In those heady days of the Clinton/Blair honeymoon, it was going to solve the problems of the West, the former communist countries and the developing world to boot.
Five years later the meeting is happening under very different circumstances. It attracted a dozen centre-left heads of government including Mr Blair, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain, Helen Clarke of New Zealand, Ricardo Lagos of Chile and Paul Martin of Canada. The Right has no equivalent meeting. But self-confidence has been replaced by an air of existential angst. Although it may sound unlikely to the British, where the Conservative Party is suffering a near-death experience, the international Left is feeling beleaguered.
There has been a loss of political power and intellectual confidence. This year, the talk was about why the Third Way did not work and what should replace it.
When the meetings were first convened, six of the G7 leading industrial nations had left-wing leaders, compared with four today. Of the 15 EU countries then, 13 were centre-left, but since then the Right has won control in Portugal, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Greece and Denmark.
In Germany, Herr Schroder has slumped in the polls. The US has a conservative President, while the European Commission is taking a distinctive lurch to the Right under Jose Manuel Barroso, its new President. In many countries, including Germany, far-right parties are making dramatic advances.
Mr Mandelson said: "The stakes for progressive politics have never been higher."
Matt Browne, the director of the Policy Network, said: "The Centre Left across Europe is struggling to define a political antidote to new kinds of populism that are fed and manipulated by a politically, if not ideologically, resurgent Right."
Mr Gyurcsany said: "We need to have the courage to have left-wing values: social justice, solidarity and a society run in the interests of the many, not the few.
For the Left the alternatives are clear: reform or failure."
In the gilt baroque ballroom of the Corinthia Grand Hotel Royal, where Austro-Hungarian royalty used to dance the night away, the left-wing heads of state were asked to pontificate on how to pursue progressive politics. Ms Clark, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, said: "The key to success for social democrats is showing you can have a market economy without a market society."
President Mbeki said that the most important thing was "to maintain the closest possible contact with the people. Allowing a distance between the Left and the people creates the space for the growth of other forces".
But not one of the leaders mentioned the Third Way. In an essay for the conference, Where now for the Third Way?, Mr Browne wrote: "The Third Way was the vehicle that allowed the Left to regain its confidence, to take on and defeat a resurgent Right. But this is no longer enough."
Delegates agreed that the Third Way simply did not provide answers to many of the world's problems: globalisation, the rise of the flexible-knowledge economy, rising crime, terrorism, modernisation of public services to give citizens both choice and flexibility, and integration in increasingly diverse and multicultural societies.
Most of those issues have traditional right-wing remedies, but what is the Third Way solution to global terrorism? The Left has yet to decide how to respond to the world's changing priorities, and the result is that in many pressing areas the Left is split.
The most obvious division is over Iraq. Mr Blair, a close ally of President Bush, and Senor Zapatero, who withdrew troops from Iraq after his surprise election victory, appear to have little in common. "Iraq probably slowed down the process of the parties talking to each other for a couple of years," Mr van Hulten said.
Some on the Left regard America as the biggest threat to the world; others see it as the strongest defender of liberal democracy. Some view globalisation as a source of the world's ills; others see it as the solution. While Paul Martin, the Canadian Prime Minister, was boasting of his record tax cuts, Goran Persson, his Swedish counterpart, was claiming to have proved that high taxes worked.
Mr Blair warned his fellow leaders: "There is a danger that progressive politics defines its economic policy by antiglobalisation, and its international politics by antiAmericanism."
But one leading German politician said: "Tony Blair is only a supposedly left wing leader - he is easily to the right of (the French President) Chirac, who is supposedly a right-wing leader."
So what comes after the Third Way? After a morning of talks, one delegate emerged, hands to his temples, declaring: "It is all very egg-headed. The talk is of the new egalitarianism."
Mr van Hulten said: "We should stop trying to provide full equality, and give people as much choice as possible as early as possible. The theme here is equality of choice."
But choice has always been the Right's rallying cry. Left-wing British MPs, for example, are bitterly opposed to Mr Blair's and the Conservative Party's policy of giving NHS patients a choice of doctors and hospitals. The new idea is that all people should not just have equal opportunity -a passive concept -but be able to exercise equal choices in all aspects of their lives.
The latest research shows that to give people equal choices in later life, you have to start early. Mr Mandelson emphasised his own recipe: "First-wave Third Way policies were correct to place their emphasis on active welfare and policies to promote life-long learning. Unfortunately, they did not prioritise investment in the early years. Today, we need to promote the cognitive development of the young."
His solution is less a political philosophy than a family-friendly policy: "In short, we must promote universal pre-school daycare."
Here Sweden, as in so many other issues, provided a model: the revelation that Swedish children have the same chance of attending university whatever their social background caused a ripple of excitement.
But delegates realised that Sweden achieved its equality only by introducing universal education vouchers and giving parents money to send their children to whatever school they want, leading to a huge increase in the number of private schools. It is a policy that the British Left has worked hard to demonise as "a free market in education".
Education vouchers are not the only policy of the Right with which the Left is flirting. Mr van Hulten, who joined Mr Martin in calling for lower taxes, said: "In the 1980s we had hang-ups about the market. Now we have hang-ups about freedom of choice. Why is freedom more inherently right-wing than left-wing?
"We've been very successful in pulling people out of poverty so the State can do less. Lowering taxes is not a right-wing, reactionary thing to do. It's a reflection of the fact we can do more for ourselves. In the long term we should contemplate being the party of lower taxes."
He continued: "Mass immigration undermines the solidarity of the welfare state.
It's legitimate to say, 'You're welcome but you can't have any benefits'. We're not saying that because we're anti-immigrant, but because we support the welfare state."
Mr Browne wrote, somewhat defensively: "Social democrats should not leave particular policy areas to be freely occupied by the Right -a view that some have confused with the adoption of rightist policies."
So here is the agenda of the new, progressive equality-of-choice Left: in favour of globalisation, free trade, lower taxes, private providers in the public sector, and education vouchers; against state monopolies and newly concerned about mass immigration.
Perhaps there is no need for the world's conservative leaders to hold conferences to set a right-wing agenda. The Left seems to be doing it for them.
WHAT THE LEFT STANDS FOR NOW
The new Left is for:
* Globalisation
* Free trade
* Lower taxes
* Privatisation
* Education vouchers
* Choice
The new Left is against:
* Mass immigration
* Benefits for all
* State monopolies