ABSTRACT
Globalisation – as both an idea and a historical process – is at the heart of the New Labour project. For its advocates, the ‘Third Way’ represents a genuine attempt to reconstruct social democracy to fit with the conditions of really existing globalisation. Failure to implement such modernisation, it is argued, makes the outlook for social democracy decidedly grim. To its critics the ‘Third Way’ represents surrender to the dictates of global capital and a calculated political strategy, resting on the hubris of globalisation, to deny the plausibility of more radical alternatives. What is at issue in this confrontation is a fundamental disagreement about the ‘facts’ of globalisation and its implications for social democracy and progressive politics. Globalisation, as both process and ideology, is pivotal to explaining the genesis of New Labour, its political programme, its philosophy of progressive governance, and the continuing existential struggle concerning Labour’s political identity and future trajectory.
