The Theory of Structuration & the Politics of the Third Way
Giddens’ shift from social theory to political strategy is in line with the major tendency of the leading contemporary leftwing theorists - Habermas and Laclau. The main statements of the politics of the Third Way - Beyond Left and Right (1994) and The Third Way - A Renewal of Social Democracy (1998) - need to be seen against the backdrop of the theory of structuration and the concept of reflexive modernity. The theory of structuration is crucial for responding to the questions of political agency and policy frameworks that Third Way theories address. The concept of reflexive modernity - subsuming globalisation as it does - provides a theory of the character of recent transformations and the scope of the differences between the social formations of the welfare state and traditional social democracy, and the new context for “positive welfare” and the “renewal of social democracy”. The analysis of post-traditional society with accelerating processes of globalisation, detraditionalisation and social reflexivity are decisive for the policy framework for social democracy that Giddens elaborates.
The differences between Giddens’ social theory and political strategy are relatively uninteresting, while the differences between Beyond Left and Right and The Third Way are highly symptomatic and provide an important entry point into the position. In Beyond Left and Right, Giddens rejects the phrase of a “third way” because of the ambiguity introduced into the term by its various historical designations (fascism, Eurocommunism, market socialism...).[62] Yet as the title indicates, in The Third Way, Giddens whole-heartedly embraces the name. The only explanation can be that the Blair and Clinton administrations had already begun to identify themselves as a “third way” and Giddens’ theoretical strategy is reformist in orientation: he seeks to enter the designation and transform its internal structure from within. This is important, since it complicates any straightforward identification of Giddens’ theory with the record of wither Clinton or Blair. This is indicated by the second half of the title, “a renewal of social democracy,” conceptualised as a project and not as a finished achievement. The Clinton and Blair “third way” therefore at best begins the “renewal of social democracy” or (more likely) points in that direction - it cannot be misrecognised as the actual process. This impression is strengthened by the signal substantive policy difference between Beyond Left and Right and The Third Way. In the earlier work, Giddens remains uncertain about the precise position and importance of equality in the programme of a renewed social democracy. By contrast, in the subsequent work, Giddens presents the “life politics” of the “new social movements” as a supplement to the politics of emancipation. High levels of inequality cannot and should not be countenanced by social democracy.[63] The contours of the relation between political theory and government practice are clarified by Giddens’ defence of the Third Way, The Third Way and Its Critics (2000). The political strategy advanced by Giddens is incomplete: it contains a normative political theory (an ethical politics), a manifesto of Third Way politics and an (incomplete) theory of social democracy and its renewal. Giddens lacks an account of the social democratic parties and their relationship to any (real or imagined) sociological constituency. The substitution of a political strategy for party organisation indicates an uncertainty as to whether social democracy has a definite social constituency, or whether it is an elective affinity based on policy appeal and charismatic leadership.
Giddens argues that the welfare state is not exclusively a socialist project, but in reality has roots in the nineteenth century in the social role of the state in the reconciliation of class conflict and the provision of social infrastructure for general developmental ambitions. The control of the poor and the neutralisation of the insurgencies of the workers’ movement appeared as liberal policies in the nineteenth century, side by side with modernisation programmes - for instance, in Bismark’s Germany. Giddens supposes that the postwar workers’ mobilisation in Western Europe was influential but not decisive for the inception of the postwar welfare state in the advanced industrialised countries. Equally important were the universal experience of the war (and therefore the shift to universal programmes as a form of generalised risk sharing), the importance of education, health and training for the technological workforce and the increasing possibilities for social control consequent upon the extension of the state’s surveillance capacities.
Yet the postwar world saw many socialist governments and therefore an identification of the programme of the social democracy with the extension of the welfare state. The socialist principles of centralised economic planning and the pursuit of equality through redistributive policies lent an important thrust to the overall direction of the welfare state. Giddens characterises the fundamental principles of the welfare state as work, solidarity and risk management. In all of these dimensions, the nation state in the era of reflexive modernity confronts a transformed set of complex social problems compared to the simple problems faced by the state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Work in the postwar world meant full-time, mainly male employment, while women were largely confined to domestic labour. Welfare programmes in the nineteenth century and after the world war were used to promote national solidarity as a component of the nation building policies of bourgeois modernisation. Simple modernisation, the emergence of the welfare state in the context of the nation state sovereignty and the serial forms of risk management practised by the welfare state are related. The risks associated with unemployment, warfare, insurgency and industrial relations within the framework of the welfare state were held in separate, sealed compartments, each one handled by an independent part of the state bureaucracy. The complexity of the second modernity and the massive alterations in every one of these areas means that the problems and the solutions now have been transformed.
Economic globalisation, according to Giddens, undermines the sovereignty of the nation state and intensifies market competition, resulting in massive deindustrialisation and the arrival in the advanced capitalist countries of post-Fordist production techniques. This context of intense competition and the apparent impotence of the nation state also mean a legitimacy crisis for the welfare system, since this threatens “the commitment of its citizens to the equation of wealth with national wealth”.[64] With the delegitimisation of the historic project of nation-building, the viability of redistributive taxation schemes comes under attack, since the concept of welfare reforms is premised upon the need for national unity. At the same time, social solidarity has also come under attack from the middle class. Giddens interprets this as a resistance of the middle class to the restricted range of choices made possible by the welfare state. For Giddens, the middle class swing against the welfare state is not an indicator of a decline in social solidarity but a sign of the need for a new concept of solidarity, one that allows more room for personal autonomy.
For Giddens, the communal experiences that contributed to the sense of social class have broken down. Class still exists, but as an individual destiny and not a collective narrative. An individual “biography” might be marked by class, but the working class communities and concentrated factory worksites are in decline. Indeed, class is defined now not just in relation to the means of production, but also in terms of the possibilities that consumption opens for displays of social distinction and status differentiation. Class and social status gradually blend as the social basis for the original Marxian concept fades.
The welfare state has also been undermined by its own inefficiencies: its inability to deliver social justice outcomes, its paternalism and its tendency to generate a permanent strata of the unemployed.
Finally, the concept of the welfare state as a “safety net” is finished. The “safety net” idea represents a simple form of social insurance. Simple modernization, the emergence of the welfare state in the context of the sovereignty of many competing nation states, and the danger of external risks (war, depression, revolution) are all connected to a non-complex society. The arrival of manufactured uncertainty, detraditionalisation and globalisation all reduce the effectiveness of the welfare state as a safety net. The increasing complexity of the social and the growing reflexivity of social agents make for a society that is extremely difficult to control. Risks are internal now and not external. According to Giddens, manufactured risks escape control: “high consequence risks ... are risks the damage associated with which cannot be compensated for - because their long term consequences are unknown and cannot be properly evaluated. They express a causality and a temporality that is diffuse and extended so that they escape orthodox modes of attribution”.[65] The decline of the welfare state and the rise of a new type of risk are related: the problem of ‘what comes after the welfare state’ is a problem of risk management.
Giddens restates the familiar list of “problems” of the post-socialist conjuncture (globalisation, individualism, the left-right opposition, agencies of social change, environmental crisis) as “dilemmas” - that is, as decisions to be taken on undecidable terrain. The theory of complexity and Ulrich Beck’s sociological reformulation in terms of the “risk society” mean that for some decisions - the ones where risks are involved because the outcomes cannot be predictably anticipated - there can be no guarantees. These represent authentic dilemmas, since the consequences are enormous but the information is insufficient. They therefore constitute an undecidable terrain where - nevertheless - decisions have to be made.
The main problem posed by globalisation is the new limits to the sovereignty of the nation state. Giddens opposes the theories of the “end of the nation state” promoted by prophets of neo-liberal globalisation like Kenichi Ohmae. Globalisation excludes any return to the Keynesian welfare state, however, since it seriously restricts the scope of national economic management.[66] At the same time, globalisation creates regional integration and disintegration across the borders of nation states. The consequences are the emergence of new ethnic and national identities and trans-national regional integrations. Giddens proposes that this means that national sovereignty is no longer a “zero sum game": it is no longer the case that a loss of national sovereignty means a gain for another (rival) nation. Instead, the role and capacities of the nation state have been transformed. Mechanisms of global economic governance, coordinated by states, are more important than ever before. Regional military alliances, economic cooperation zones and cultural policies are now vital and effective. This means that in some respects, nation states are more powerful than before. At the same time, they can only be effective in alliance with other nation states, localities, transnational groups and regional structures. “Government hence becomes less identified with ‘the’ government - a national government - and more wide-ranging. ‘Governance’ becomes a more relevant concept to refer to some forms of administrative or regulatory capacities. Agencies which either are not part of any government - non-governmental organizations - or are transnational in character contribute to governance”.[67]
Rising individualism has been supposed and denounced since the 1980s. According to the standard argument, the post-traditional society, involving a plurality of different lifestyles, multiculturalism and post-material values, also involves a new individualism which erodes social solidarity. From the “me generation,” to “generation X,” social and cultural commentators have lamented the decline in universally binding cultural norms and the rise of an apparently ego-centric new breed of yuppies. The Left explains this in terms of economic rationalism and the new middle class, while the Right blames the 1960s counter-culture and a new permissive liberalism. Giddens agrees that a new individualism has taken hold, but denies that this is a threat to social solidarity. He describes this as a new “individuation” rather than individualism and suggests that it is not the same as moral decay. Drawing upon work on the “new political culture” dominant with affluent youth (but now increasingly extending towards youth in general), Giddens argues that this generation is preoccupied with post-material moral values rather than material questions. This is an unforeseen consequence of the welfare state, which provided universal education and a strong set of individual rights, generating new possibilities for individual distinction. This is a period of moral transition and not moral decay - instead of egoism, we should talk of lifestyle. Solidarity can be renewed, Giddens argues, through a balance of individual and collective responsibility, and a framework of individual rights.
For Giddens, the advent of reflexive modernity and the risk society mean that the political division between the socialist Left and the neo-conservative Right have to be transcended. While the Left versus Right framework remains important, it is increasingly supplemented now by a new framework of post-material moral values, or lifestyle politics. Where the relation between the state and the market defined the Left - Right opposition during the twentieth century, there now exists a consensus on the importance of the free market and the impossibility of socialism. This is not to say that traditional emancipatory politics is finished - rather, it has to be supplemented by lifestyle politics. These include questions of moral values (community versus autonomy), environmental issues, the balance between work and the quality of life, the transformation of the family. None of these, Giddens claims, can be adequately addressed within the framework of the traditional Left-Right polarity. Likewise, European integration, regional autonomy, the politics and ethics of technology all challenge the fixed borders of last century’s divisions. “Nearly all the questions of life politics mentioned above require radical solutions or suggest radical policies, on different levels of government. All are potentially divisive, but the conditions and alliances required to cope with them don’t necessarily follow those based on the division of economic interest. ... Bottom-up alliances can be built, and provide a basis for radical policies. Tackling ecological problems, for instance, certainly often demands a radical outlook, but that radicalism can in principle command a widespread consensus. From responding to globalisation, to family policy, the same applies”.[68] For Giddens, therefore, the “radical center” is defined by its willingness to implement comprehensive solutions, not by its tendency to strike at the social roots of problems. This radical center is a site for the construction of political and social alliances between different lifestyles. Nevertheless, Giddens’ position is best described as center-left. Emancipatory politics, social justice and the fight for equality remain at the core of social democratic politics. This means a reform of the welfare state (not its abolition). At the same time, social democrats have to “recognize and incorporate active lifestyle choices, be integrated with ecological strategies and respond to new risk scenarios”.[69]
Giddens believes that the combination of the old social movement (the trade unions and the labour movement) with the new social movements, solves the question of agency for the Third Way. The depressing speculations on “the end of politics” as a result of universal apathy and media manipulation, the theories of the irrelevance of politics as a result of the terminal decline of the nation state, are dismissed by Giddens. Giddens outlines several tasks for the nation state and government: (1) government is a means for the representation of the whole nation and the reconciliation of antagonistic interests (2) the state can regulate the market when the public interest is threatened and promote competition where monopoly begins (3) the state can secure social peace through the enforcement of its monopoly on armed force (4) the state is the essential foundation for the rule of law (5) government can be an employer, infrastructure provider and it can exercise strategic direction through investment and economic governance through statutory authorities and central banking (6) the state nourishes a national culture and system of norms (7) the state contributes to transnational alliances and regional policies.[70] At the same time, the emergence of “sub-politics” - single issue movements - changes politics but does not remove political parties from center stage. While governments cooperate with or oppose the new social movements, the state and government remain the primary political actors.
Political innovation in Europe has been linked mainly to the ecological movement. The ecological crisis represents a major contemporary form of risk. Giddens is attracted to policies of sustainable growth, preventative measures, environmental regulation and incentives and the concept that pollution is economically inefficient.[71] Giddens accepts that the tension between environment and economy is constitutive of the field of ecological politics and that there are limitations to national approaches to a global problem. Yet for Giddens, these are really questions of a response to risk. The thesis of the post-traditional society means “the end of nature and tradition”. Science has redefined what nature is and the emergence of new social movements questioning the limits of this ability of technology to define nature is indicative of the widespread perception that scientific questions cannot be solved by the experts alone. This opens scientific questions to political processes of consensus formation and political negotiation, and places transparency and rational justification on top of the agenda for public control of science. Giddens advocates what he calls an offensive strategy for risk management, that is, the active exploration of risk environments and the ability to take productive risks.[72]
Giddens “rethinking” of democracy aims to foster social solidarity and to encourage ethical responsibility. The concept of a dialogical democracy is intended to perform this task.[73] Giddens is a “proceduralist” - that is, in the debate between advocates of participatory democracy and defenders of representative institutions, Giddens side with ... neither and both. His watchword is “transparency” in all processes rather than a normative theory of the best form of democratic polity.
This departs from the recognition that differences of opinion are constitutive of democratic politics and that therefore the form of legitimacy that a democratic government enjoys is derived from its ability to embody the result of public debate and contestation. Deliberative democracy is supposed to have application not only to formal government but also to the spheres of everyday life affected by the politics of the new social movements.
Deliberative democracy is supplemented by dialogic democracy. The demands imposed by post-traditional society for the invention of new relations imply the ability to generate trust and mutual recognition. This involves a dialogue but not necessarily consensus. The scope and transparency of democratic dialogue are therefore fundamental to the legitimacy of the results. The only alternatives - Giddens proposes - are fundamentalist violence.
Giddens proposes that dialogic democracy is emerging in the personal arena of intimate relationships, in the wresting of power from experts broadly across society, within many organizations and corporations, and on a global scale between nations and transnational groups. Dialogic democracy, individuation and post-traditional social relations might appear as a disintegration of the social fabric, but what they in fact dissolve is ‘fixed and frozen forms,’ replacing these with a higher level of democratic integration.
Giddens’ concept of social integration is summarized as cosmopolitan citizenship. A citizen is affiliated to and loyal to a family, a nation state and a regional supra-state structure (the European Union). At the core of this concept of citizenship are trust, responsibility and solidarity. Trust describes the confidence an agent experiences in relation to the integrity of the other (the other family member, national citizen or Western European). Responsibility refers to a commitment to a shared normative framework defining limits to autonomy and obligations to the others. For Giddens, these are not a fixed substance that can be deduced from the nature of the social bond in question, but subject to continuous negotiation and renegotiation. These negotiated responsibilities form the basis for cosmopolitan solidarity. While the citizen enjoys individual rights (personal autonomy, economic and political liberties), these belong to the framework of emancipatory politics. The same applies to obligations like conscription and taxation. The framework of the responsibilities and solidarity that come with cosmopolitan citizenship define a new cosmopolitan nationalism, for Giddens. It depends upon the extension of the dialogical space opened by the new social movements being generalized from the sub-political to the political level.
Giddens advocates a new framework for welfare policies based on “reflexive engagement” with expert systems. He describes this as “generative politics” - generative of trust. The development of relations of trust between individuals and experts is vital to Giddens’ concept of welfare. This trust cannot be assumed to be inherited from tradition, because the climate of manufactured uncertainty erodes this confidence. Trust now has to be actively and consciously created.
Generative political programmes have to enable political goals to be achieved but these ends cannot be determined from above - they have to be generated from below. This requires an environment of active trust between government (and related institutions), individuals and groups. One aim of this policy framework is to enable extended autonomy for people on welfare, including the provision of mental and material resources for this autonomy (skills, access to ideas and education, financial and logistical support). Another aim is the decentralization of political power, since for Giddens, “bottom up” information and recognition of autonomy are essential for efficiency.
For instance, Giddens advocates a new solution for poverty based on “mobilizing life-political measures, aimed once more at connecting autonomy with personal and collective responsibilities”.[74] This entails a shift from a definition of poverty solely in material terms to one that embraces lifestyle possibilities, inner happiness and the reduction of dependency in addition to material needs. Inspired by Third World poverty reduction programmes that focus on alternative employment, sustainable economies, respect for local traditions and skill transfers, Giddens argues that poverty in the advanced capitalist countries might be addressed by similar programmes.
Beyond the concept of “band-aid” policies, Giddens suggests, lies preventative measures and a redefined concept of the good life and happiness. These do not necessarily entail prosperity, but they do involve autonomy and positive self-interpretation.[75] Positive welfare aims at the creation of an “autotelic self":
“The autotelic self is one with an inner confidence which comes from self-respect, and one where a sense of ontological security, originating in basic trust, allows for the positive appreciation of social difference. It refers to a person able to translate potential threats into rewarding challenges, someone who is able to turn entropy into a consistent flow of experience. The autotelic self does not seek to neutralize risk or to suppose that “someone else will take care of the problem”; risk is confronted as the active challenge which generates self-actualisation”.[76]
Combating structural inequalities and reducing dependency are therefore two sides of the same coin - but an indivisible coin, not one where one side can be mortgaged to the future while the other is exclusively circulated.
Giddens’ central argument, in Beyond Left and Right (1994) is that Enlightenment social theory and political strategy is insufficient for the conditions of reflexive modernity (pp. 22-77). The reconceptualised welfare state has to redefine work, solidarity and risk management, ecological threats and economic polarization, democratization, globalisation and the “new individuation”. Behind this lies the programme of the “renewal of social democracy” as a viable politics for the twenty-first century.
Giddens conceives of the “radical center” as founded upon a set of “third way values,” combining aspects of socialism and conservatism with political liberalism. This new mix is needed to guide citizens through the transformations in work and intimacy, politics and the relation to nature that the second modernity opens. Yet despite the theory of a post-traditional society, Giddens stands for the preservation of aspects of tradition as integrative of the individual into the social domain. Instead of the conservative values of allegiance to authority, tradition and nation, Giddens suggests that third way conservation is a sort of moral and community heritage trust (my description) which preserves the façades whilst updating the interiors of traditionary values and community allegiances. At the same time, Giddens advocates the critical approach of socialism as its remaining viable legacy.
He regards the third way values as based on equality, autonomy, protection of the vulnerable, “no rights without responsibilities,” “no authority without democracy,” and cosmopolitan pluralism.[77] The centerpiece for the new politics is the slogan “no rights without responsibilities”. For instance, the right to unemployment benefits brings with it the responsibility to look actively for work. The concept of “no authority without democracy” specifies the social democratic relation to the transformations in intimacy and tradition wrought by the post-traditional society: social democrats support the changes when they represent a democratization of social relations, and believe that reconceptualised post-traditional authority, conceived as an opening of tradition to rational justification and elective belonging, can supply some of the social solidarity necessary for a “strong society”. These values supply the framework within which the apparently contradictory combination of “philosophical conservatism” and social modernization can be sustained - according to Giddens. He advocates the preservation of local cultures, histories and traditions, and a preservative relation to the environment. Giddens argues that we need to modernize in terms of democracy, government, citizenship and to redefine the relationship between equality and autonomy in traditional social democratic thinking.
Between the writing of Between Left and Right (1994) and The Third Way (1998), Giddens clarified the status of the discourse of equality in the social democratic Imaginary: while the initial work is vague, the later book stresses the continued centrality of equality to the social democratic programme. Social democratic thinking cannot accept that high levels of inequality are functional to economic prosperity (the Thatcherite ‘trickle-down’ concept), but at the same time, social democrats “should move away from what has sometimes in the past been an obsession with inequality, as well as rethink what equality is. Equality must contribute to diversity, not stand in its way”.[78]
Giddens lists a number of positions as a preliminary framework for all future social democratic policy platforms:[79]
Giddens accepts certain highly strategic criticisms of the welfare state and socialism that have come from the Right. These are that the welfare state is not democratic enough, since it is bureaucratic, alienating and inefficient, and that the market economy is more efficient than a command system because the plurality of economic agents possess more information than any central administrative authority. Both of these criticisms originate in the work of the godfather of economic rationalism, Hayek. Giddens seems to be agnostic on the privatization of government services (perhaps regarding this as inevitable, in line with economic rationalist orthodoxy) and regards business as a source of inspiration for institutional efficiency and strategic direction.
For Giddens, processes of democratization are “outflanking democracy” - that is, traditional representative institutions, particularly parliamentary democracy, are themselves being democratized as part of a generalized democratization of the society. The “legitimation crisis” in the Western democracies (voter apathy and the resurgence of anti-democratic politics) is a symptom of the distance remaining between parliamentary democracy and the new social movements and transformations of the post-traditional society. Globalisation forces a decentralization of political power, and this can be a powerful force for democratization, according to Giddens, since it involves decentralization downwards to the regional and local levels, as well as renewed importance of international bodies and global governance. The responsibility of state and government is to facilitate these transformations by encouraging decentralization, and to create greater transparency of processes.
At the same time, Giddens argues that a renewal of civil society is vital for the “democratization of democracy”. Civil society consists of the institutional framework lying between economics and politics (the church, family, mass media and cultural forms, educational institutions and public forums). In Beyond Left and Right, Giddens presumed that any social democratization included a renewal of civil society but argued that this is insufficient: civil society is not a solution to the problems of democracy, since without directly combating the problems of the state and bureaucracy, any renewal of civil society will be meaningless.[80] In The Third Way, Giddens reversed his position: now a real civic decline is taking place, involving a weakening of solidarity, rising crime, marriage and family break-up and a decline in civic participation. These problems can only be solved when government and civil society cooperate. “State and civil society should act in partnership, each to facilitate, but also to act as a control upon, the other.” There are no permanent barriers between state and civil society. A self-reflexive society provides the basis for a highly organized and self-conscious civil society, and Giddens claims that recent research indicates that this is the case in the UK and the USA.[81] In the detraditionalised family, it is important to secure a balance between autonomy and responsibility. In policy terms, this means linking community renewal to an open public sphere to avoid the separation of groups in civil society from the wider society. In terms of the family, it means enhancement of the ability to sustain relationships during changes (including divorce and family break-up). Giddens suggests co-parenting arrangements and life-long parental contracts, presumably with a legally enforceable character. For Giddens, civil society is an entity conditioned by the state and not the reverse: therefore the state has to protect individuals from conflicts arising in civil society. Civil society is not a spontaneous and harmonious order.
For the renewed social democracy, the state is a “social investment state”. Its economic role is redefined, from a major employer and economic regulator to a strategic investor in technological development and human capital. This is part of the programme of the redistribution of possibilities so as to create an “inclusive society”. Instead of concentration upon material wealth and poverty, Giddens suggests that social democrats focus upon the social mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion which generate the cultures of poverty, unemployment, domestic violence and criminality. The state as a social investor is the central means to secure not the redistribution of wealth but the redistribution of possibilities.
A crucial mechanism for creating a social investment state is the “new mixed economy”. This consists of a balance between regulation and deregulation (not the former balance of public and private enterprise, since it is now assumed that no wholly government enterprises survive). Giddens views exclusion as linked to the erosion of the public realm. This can only be reconstructed through a renewal of civic liberalism. According to Giddens, public space can be recaptured through fostering a cosmopolitan nation, including the widespread sense of inclusion in the national community. This depends on preventing the new corporate rich and the professional middle classes from excluding themselves from the national community, by withdrawing into a privately insured (and guarded) world. Giddens therefore proposes a welfare system that benefits the whole society: “only a welfare system that benefits most of the population will generate a common morality of citizenship”.[82] Policy spheres that can generate inclusion include pollution, health, public education and strategies to reduce poverty.
Education is probably the central mechanism for inclusion in the lens of the new social democratic Imaginary. Although education is not a panacea (since education alone cannot create jobs and access to education reflects patterns of inequality) it is a major resource for the generation of high tech human capital and for the sense of social inclusion. However, the main source of social inclusion is employment. Having a job is vital to social participation and political agency, but a society founded on an exclusive work ethic (which refuses to recognize the diversity of lifestyle possibilities, many not containing formal employment) is no alternative. “An inclusive society must provide for the basic needs of those who can’t work, and must recognize the wider diversity of goals life has to offer”.[83] Civil and political rights have to be supplemented by social rights.
The current unemployment benefit system leads to a culture of dependency and marginalisation, resulting in near or total exclusion and behaviour transformations during unemployment consonant with loss of self esteem, desocialisation and collapse of community normative standards. Giddens argues for retaining the right to unemployment benefits while pushing recipients into a job or education.
The concept of generative politics means supplying people with resources, and investment in human capital is probably the most tangible form of this policy direction. Welfare expenditure has to be redirected towards community development and educational provision, and away from conventional poverty programmes and direct state employment creation. Community development includes voluntary and community work, as well as joint government and private enterprise projects.
Generative politics also means a redefinition of the nature of old age, including the relaxation of mandatory retirement. Pensions should be made flexible so as to include the possibility of drawing on the pension before retirement to bring up children or to finance education once retired. Once it becomes a personal decision when to leave the workforce, Giddens believes that this will result in a larger and more flexible workforce enjoying better quality of life throughout the entire life cycle.
In summary, the values of the radical center and generative politics mean a social investment state and positive welfare society. This implies a state in partnership with business and non-government agencies which concentrates upon the redistribution of possibilities. The positive welfare society is conceived as inclusive and oriented to a strong national community, which is the basis for cosmopolitan engagement and citizenship beyond the borders of the nation state. Central to this ethical politics is the shift towards increased autonomy and the development of the self as the medium for encouraging individual responsibility.
The reform of the welfare state is integrated within wider global processes and can be regarded as part of a global shift away from state centralization and the statification of capital. For Giddens, the legitimacy of the nation state during modernity depended on its ability to protect its citizens (rule of law, military prowess). According to Giddens, the nation state no longer has enemies, but now experiences dangers or risks, to be managed in cooperation between experts, politicians and citizen groups. The strong nation state is no longer defined by the impermeability of its frontiers and its military might. With regional economic cooperation and international migration, borders become permeable and fuzzy and national interests become a dispersed set or shifting scale, rather than a tightly knit cluster of definite priorities. Giddens believes that war as the extension of politics has disappeared - this is the importance of the thesis of the difference between “new and old wars”. This means a new concept of nationality and national identity.
Despite multiculturalism, multi-ethnic belonging and regional integration, national identity is still important, Giddens supposes. It is belonging to a national community that lends the individual the decisive ontological security necessary for participation in the world environment and for cosmopolitan citizenship. A cosmopolitan nation means a reflexive construction of national identity rather than the fixed and automatic concept of nationhood proper to the era of nineteenth century nation-building and twentieth century national integration. National identities “need to be sustained in an open and discursive way, in cognizance not only of their complexities but of the other loyalties with which they overlap. Implied is a more reflexive construction of national identity, a modernizing project par excellence”.[84] According to Giddens, only a truly cosmopolitan nation can be multicultural, and multicultural politics presuppose support from the broader community. The sense that justice reaches beyond substantial bonds of belonging (blood and soil) is essential for elementary multicultural social behaviour. There is a strong link, in the social democratic Imaginary, between open national identity and multiculturalism: “much more rests on the majority’s sense of fairness than multiculturalists appreciate, and that sense of fairness is liable to be contracted if groups issuing demands reject the identity by which they belong in the same community as the majority”.[85]
This is the key to the solution to the looming problem of immigration in Europe. A cosmopolitan nation is the only position that can respond to differences between national, ethnic, religious and regional groups without recourse to violence.
For Giddens, the volatile world economy and transnational environmental problems require a new model of global governance. Without global governance and the regulation of environmental and economic problems, Giddens predicts serious problems. At the same time, Giddens is supremely optimistic that global democracy is emerging in new, transnational forms. The concept of cosmopolitan nations is designed to open a space for the rethinking of sovereignty, international relations and economic governance, once the sharp division between internal and external policy frameworks has been dissolved. Indications of the emergence of a global democracy can be seen in the growth of cooperative associations and transnational organizations. Globalisation has to some degree undermined national sovereignty and transferred power to the market, but at the same time this opens unprecedented opportunities for global politics of economic and social governance.
Giddens advocates increased global cooperation and governance structures. The central model is the European Union. The EU is now responsible for 75% of all economic legislation and 50% of domestic legislation in Western Europe throughout member states.[86] On these lines, Giddens suggests a global parliament, an international administration on the lines of the EU Commission, an intergovernmental association (similar to the EU Council of Ministers) and a federal court of law (like the European Court of Justice). In this context, Giddens proposes the reform and integration of the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, United Nations, the OECD and an expansion of the model of the International Criminal Court. Immediately, Giddens proposes the need for a stable international exchange rate and advocates the so-called Tobin Tax on purely speculative financial transactions.
Along with the majority of postmodern philosophy and social theory, Giddens subscribes to a simplistic ideological caricature of the Enlightenment. This current regards Enlightenment thinking as a rationalist dictatorship driven by the naïve belief in human rationality towards a social engineering model of a transparent society. A scarcely concealed will to power is masked, in “Enlightenment” thought, by the dream of social and natural mastery and the vision of a rational social totality “after politics”. This reduces the great thinkers of the Enlightenment to the level of Fourier’s picturesque schemes for social utopia.
Instead of challenging the now dominant liberalism on the terrain of its greatest strength - the presumed relation between capitalism, democracy and autonomy - Giddens agrees with the central premises of Enlightenment liberalism (the social contract), modern liberalism (Kantian autonomy) and neo-liberalism (Hayekian claims regarding the impossibility of rationally regulating the ‘free market'). Giddens historical survey of the development of liberal democracy and the prospects for “global democracy” in the epoch of transnational corporations and multipolar imperialist rivalries is embarrassing. There is no recognition that mass democracy was won against the elite model of modern liberalism. The assertion that nation states no longer have enemies, that national economies do not engage in destructive rivalries and that the Western European model can be generalized without any measures to also generalize the prosperity of the advanced capitalist countries, is frankly tendentious. It is reminiscent of the worst apologies for colonialism, combined with some of the least convincing Fabian proposals for a democracy of “good will”.
Giddens’ proposition that the transnational character of capitalism tends to reduce the military rivalries of the superpowers has a long (though not distinguished) history in social democratic thinking. This is not correlated with any serious attempt to come to grips with the economic literature on the structure and national composition of the transnational corporations. Once again, it reflects the usual social democratic equation of capitalism and democracy. It is more out of step with reality today than one hundred years ago, when the Bernstein proposed this as a leading theme of his revision of historical materialism.
Giddens’ link with the anti-Enlightenment current of communitarian philosophy is incoherent, particularly when used as a supplement to the basic “social liberalism” of his belief in autonomy and democracy. Drawing on John Gray’s work, Giddens argues that a strain of conservatism acts to preserve tradition and community without demanding allegiance to traditional authority. This strain of communitarianism stresses the value of a “common culture” as the intersubjective product of past dialogues and argues that “it is only by strengthening the resources of a common culture ... that we can hope to renew the institutions of civil society across generations. To assume that we can rely on a regime of abstract rules is the merest folly”.[87] Conservativism and the Green movement have both come to the conclusion that unlimited and continuous growth cannot be sustained.
Yet Giddens argues that conservativism is bound to decline because it cannot understand the transformation of tradition in a post-traditional society. A tradition is a ritual practice connected to revealed truth and defended by traditional authorities. But authority cannot be legitimized by reference to traditional (unquestionable) truth any more, since reflexive modernity interrogates tradition continually. The transformation of tradition and the disappearance of nature indicate that they are not the external frameworks for human activity any longer. All social practices require rational justification today. Traditional defense of tradition means fundamentalism in this new, cosmopolitan context.
Therefore all that remains of traditions are “generalisable sources of solidarity”.[88] It is difficult to understand what this means, except perhaps a formal reference to traditional origins as a legitimating ideology, while the content becomes modernized. The concept of “preservation” - with its middle class connotations of heritage façades and nature preservation - hangs around this constellation of concepts with a distinct aroma of bad faith. The suggestion that “conservation” and “preservation” might have immediate political justifications as a pitch to an electorate battered by economic rationalism but still captivated by post-Thatcher “family values” begins to surface.
Likewise, Giddens’ critique of the “cybernetic model” of socialist command economies has a lot to do with the aspirations of the bureaucratic middle classes in the capitalist and “socialist” world to conduct social engineering experiments in industrial development and social management, but nothing to do with the Enlightenment.