Speaking of the Third Way...

Over the weekend Helen Clark attended the Progressive Governance Summit in Budapest. The Progressive Governance Network is a loose affiliation of "third way" and social democratic governments founded by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as an alternative to the more traditional Socialist International. It gets together every year to network, talk shop, and issue a joint communique. This year's communique reflected the summit's broadening membership - leaders from South Africa, Ethopia, Chile and South Korea attended as well as the usual Europeans - and thus had a heavy focus on development aid and building an "open and fair-rules based global economic and trade system" (which isn't necessarily a bad thing - it all hinges on what the rules actually are). The "peace and security" section also took a wider view, including HIV/AIDS and environmental degradation as threats to global peace, rather than just terrorism and WMD. However, it does seem that you can't invite the British to a meeting without their trying to ram an American agenda through; if they were really concerned about WMD, they'd start by getting rid of their own.

Interestingly, two key terms missing from the communique were equality and human rights. Sure, there was talk of "empowerment" and the need to "increase opportunity and social mobility", even of "social justice", but this is all equality of opportunity stuff. The old egalitarian ideal of striving to improve equality of outcome seems to be entirely absent. As for human rights, they don't even get a look in. I guess this is what happens when you have to share a meeting with a "progressive" regime which "continues to deny its citizens' basic human rights and to repress the unarmed opposition"...