Classic third way or before its time? The New Zealand labour party in local and transnational context

Abstract

The exceptionalist debate in labour history has concentrated upon the distinctiveness of a country’s labour, its uniqueness and historical contingency. Some historians are concerned that the current popularity of transnationalism in comparative history achieves exactly the opposite: it, ‘flattens and schematizes the richness, messiness, complexity, and the individuality’ of the case study. In this paper I consider politicians’, political scientists’ and sociologists’ enthusiasm for the Third Way model, which seems to concentrate upon commonalities and convergence in the political economies of the western world from the 1930s and 1940s. New Zealand appears to be a classic example of First Way under its first Labour Government (1939-1949), Second Way under its Fourth Labour Government (1984-1990) and Third Way under its Fifth Labour Government (1999-2008). On closer examination, this view only holds if one adopts a caricatured view of ‘Old Labour’ and, although I do not consider it here, the ‘New Right’, too. I argue that a model like the Third Way can be just as useful to labour historians of later twentieth century social democracy as the exceptionalist debate has been to labour historians of class and consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century. Rather than flattening experience, a fine-grained and historical consideration of the Third Way model is useful for it indicates the extent to which New Zealand was early to modernise its social democracy. New Zealand was the first social democratic party in the western world to abandon the socialisation objective and it should come as no surprise to see early intimations of the Third Way in the antipodes either. Show more