Disappearing the poor?": A critique of the new wisdoms of social democracy in an age of globalization

This paper considers the claims of Third Way models of social democracy to offer an alternative to neoliberalism in Latin America that could reconcile capitalism with social justice, focusing in particular on the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens. Giddens argues that the basic concept of social citizenship embodied in his formulation of Third Way politics is relevant to the countries of the South, and his ideas have found a certain resonance among Latin American politicians and intellectuals responding to the evident failures of, and popular challenges to, the neoliberal development model. Yet Giddens's analysis does not hold up well even in Northern countries. His arguments highlight the individual and "life politics" in a way that strips "the poor" of their social personalities while reifying "society" and evading or misconstruing key issues in the analysis of contemporary patterns of inequality in the North and the South and the power relationships that underlie global inequality. The result is a strongly normalizing and moralizing set of proposals that seem not merely misguided but pernicious when transfered to the Mexican context. Reviewing the orientation to date Fox administration, against the background of the social effects of neoliberal transformation and the power relations that will continue to shape future developments, the paper concludes that Third Way rhetoric should be seen as another manifestation of attempts to defend an existing global hegemony against the forces that contest it in radical terms.