The Third Way" has come to symbolize the effort to revive European social democratic politics at the start of the twenty-first century. Having rejected old-style socialist statism and the free-market economics of the New Right, leading social democrats claim to have identified an alternative that cuts a path between state and market. Two of the major parties of the left in Europe — the British Labour Party under Tony Blair and the German Social Democrats under Gerhard Schröder — have heralded a Third Way or, in German, a "new middle" (Neue Mitte), an ideology of the "radical centre" (see Blair, 1998, 2001; Blair and Schröder, 1999). Instead of a confrontational leftism, doomed forever to protest and never govern, proponents of the Third Way have announced a politics that purports to move beyond the antagonism between left and right.