We've started hearing quite a bit about 'The Third Way' recently, and no doubt we shall be hearing a great deal more of it in the near future. Get used to it.
While it sounds like the title of an L. Ron Hubbard book, the Third Way is being touted as a kind of supra-political set of ethics for dealing with global problems that politics-as-usual cannot fix.
In the past, similar noises about a Third Way have usually emanated from politicians fed up with being ignored by the power players in a two-party system; classic examples would be the Social Democrats in the Britain of the early 1980s, or Ross Perot and his Reform Party in 90s America.
In both those nations, the two-party dominance remains. And now, it is the leaders of those two countries who are talking about the Third Way - no longer as a party political term, but as a yardstick for improving the performance of their governing parties.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and United States President Bill Clinton took time off from their United Nations duties to host a public meeting at New York University on Monday - a session so casual it was almost as if the men were talking shop over a cold beer after a round of golf.
The seminar, ostensibly dealing with the strengthening of democracy and social structures in a time when globalisation is sweeping away national boundaries, was in some ways a coming-out party for the Third Way, starring its two principal sponsors.
One of the criticisms of this new ideology is it is impossible to pin down and that it stands for the same wishy-washy liberal capitalism (usually from the right, which believes it has been left out of the debate), there is no doubt it is often easier to say what the Third Way is not, rather than what it is.
