Globalisation and Third Way Theories: The Beleaguered Family and the Marginalisation of Women

India transformed in 1947 from a colonised nation into an independent ‘sovereign democratic republic’. The 42nd amendment of the Constitution in 1976 added the terms ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ to make India a ‘sovereign socialist secular democratic republic’. The socialist slant has been gradually eroded with the economic liberalisation ushered in by the balance-of-payment crisis of 1991. ¹ Economic liberalisation demanded a structural adjustment programme to include, among other changes, privatisation, the opening up of international trade and investment and deregulation linked to a dominant national and political economy.

It was in this context that new Indian oligarchs, such as Ambani and Mittal, visibly emerged on the national scene, but they needed a nexus with the political class to secure their gains. They gave the political class good commissions when the public sector was opened up to them, as in agriculture, the automotive industry, coal mining, and the steel and textile industries. The oligarchs thereby established some control over industry.

In countries such as India, alliances between emerging oligarchs and the political class have worsened the divide between the haves and the have-nots, and created new flashpoints that go unchecked in a society already beset by the fault lines of caste, class and gender. For instance, the judiciary, the main pillar of democratic society, along with other institutions such as education, has, by revising its socialist agenda, complied with the changes brought on by economic liberalism.

In such a scenario, where the entire system of governance is in crisis, the Third Way of thinking comes into play. The official version of the Euro-American concept of the Third Way of thinking resurfaced in the vacuum created by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the retreat of socialism and unfettered neoliberalism’s inadequacy as an effective alternative. The term had been around for a while, for example, in reference to the alternative proposed by Pope Pius XII to both capitalism and socialism. During the Cold War period, the Third Way was used most often by social democrats to steer a path away from American capitalism and Soviet communism.

In the 1990s this way of thinking was revived in the political contexts of the USA and Great Britain by the Clinton and Blair administrations, best reflected in the renaming of their respective parties: New Democrats and New Labour. They argued that the rapidly changing times—brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the explosion of information technology—made it difficult for national governments to maintain or deliver the old type of social contract (Blair & Shröder, 1999). There had to be a paradigm shift and the Third Way was the answer. This way of thinking, as stated by the guru of Third Way theories, Anthony Giddens, was not a compromise between the right and the left since, in any case, the forces of globalisation and the ‘disintegration of communism’ had already unimaginably altered the contours of the left/right divide. Instead it referred to ‘a framework of thinking and policy-making that seeks to adapt social democracy to a world which has changed fundamentally’ (Giddens, 1998, p. 26).

I argue that India’s own economic reforms should be interrogated within the theoretical framework of the Third Way, which has rapidly gained currency with several governments across the world within the context of globalisation. Indian scholars have been critiquing the role of the state and the limits of neoliberalism at the present global conjuncture with regard to the social units of family and community, particularly in relation to women (see Menon, 2004). However, few have engaged these critiques within the theoretical frame of Third Way thinking.

In a mixed economy like India’s, economic reforms triggered by neoliberalism in the fields of education, agency, dialogic democracy, informed citizenry, equality, and family and the community seemingly offer possibilities for a renewed politics; in reality, however, they adversely affect vast constituencies of marginalised people, particularly women.

The Third Way’s attempts to forge ties between social democracy and neoliberalism for a consensual hybridised renewal of the former should be seen as a pre-emptive move to ‘suppress the conflictual potential of the pioneering regimes of the radical right, and kill off opposition to neo-liberal hegemony more completely’ (Anderson, 2000, p. 11 as cited in Abraham, 2007, p. 135). Feminist scholars should critically grasp some of its central concepts to challenge and politically re-elaborate them and also demonstrate their limitations in relation to a feminist agenda or, for that matter, to any policies for good governance. Feminists should understand that neoliberal capitalism—within which Third Way theories are firmly rooted—valourises ‘a masculinist romance of the free, unencumbered, self-fashioning individual’ (Fraser, 2009, p. 110).

Third Way thinking projects globalisation as an epoch-defining phenomenon both in its descriptive and in its prescriptive aspects. In its descriptive aspect globalisation is seen as the international flow of capital, investment and technological development. Transnational corporations, along with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum, are the main organisational conduits for the policing of this new economic order in the interests of the Western powers. Through the Structural Adjustment Programme, these organs streamline world economies to align them to the changing needs of the new economic order. Under this system many Third World countries have been coerced at ‘the gun-point of debt’ to ‘divest their assets, open their markets and slash social spending’ (Fraser, 2009, p. 107). In its prescriptive aspect, the so-called ‘developmental’ paradigm of globalisation is seen as inevitable rather than as contingent upon capitalism.

Economists have pointed out that the distribution of wealth is not a mere economic phenomenon but closely tied to political decisions. Furthermore, ‘there is no natural spontaneous process to prevent destablizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently’ (Piketty, 2014, pp. 20–21). In this context, it is clear that interventions are necessary to stem the current tide of neoliberalism and its Third Way theories, and counter-discourses have to be created, particularly in relation to the marginalisation of women.

From the feminist perspective, an appropriate entry point for understanding women’s marginalisation within the neoliberal global economy is to critique the ‘in-between’ area of civil society. This is the area, Third Way theorists state, which will bridge the ‘large democratic deficits’ that are opening up due to the explosion of information technology and new forms of social reflexivity (Giddens, 2002, p. 45). Rather than viewing the market and the state as the only two sectors that can bring about societal change, Third Way thinking identifies the family and the community as significant social units in the regeneration of civil society. Recasting them in their modern milieu, such theorists argue, would make the social units of family and community important conduits towards creating an ‘informed citizenry’ with democratic attitudes, ‘including tolerance’, and this is because, they claim, through ‘personal life—parent–child relations, sexual relations, friendship relations—dialogic democracy advances to the degree to which such relationships are ordered through dialogue rather than through embedded power’ (Giddens, 1994, p. 16). Dialogic democracy, Third Way thinking advocates, is one way of introducing ‘life politics’ into the realm of politics at large.

To extol the virtues of civil society, as the Third Way does, without understanding that civilians too are produced and reproduced within social relations rather than outside them, or to see only the state and civil society as antagonistic without understanding that there are several kinds of exploitation within civil society itself, is naïve to say the least (Fine, Robert, & Rai, 1997).

In India, the social formations of family and community are still ‘patriarchal, exclusionary and hierarchical’ in nature, and the disempowered are subordinated within these social units (Shah, 2005, p. 709). The cases of Ameena and Sathin Bhanwari, both of which date ironically to 1992, coinciding with the onset of neoliberalism in India, illustrate the multiple inequalities of caste, class and gender that have already existed within the social units of the family and the community, and are further complicated by the dynamics of neoliberalism.

The Ameena case catapulted on to the national scene at the peak of the discourse on liberal democracy and the accelerated phase of globalisation in the last decade of the 20th century. Significantly, the conflict between the two value systems of capitalist global economy, with its stress on individualism and instrumental rationality, and liberal democracy, with its emphasis on citizenship, democracy, patriotism and human rights, was played out on the woman as its site.

Ameena was a Muslim child-bride of 11 years who was forcibly married by her poor father to an old Saudi national for the sum of ₹6,000. She was rescued by a flight attendant while flying from Hyderabad to Delhi en route to Saudi Arabia. The central irony in this case was that after the long process of court hearings, in which Ameena’s sexuality became the site for the multiple and contradictory pulls of family, community, the legal system and the state for defining themselves, she was given the choice of either continuing to live at the state-run Nari Niketan (where she was very unhappy) or to return to her family. She chose the latter, returning to the very situation from which her troubles arose. As Sunder Rajan incisively remarks, the subaltern subject was given agency, but devoid of her subjective history (Sunder Rajan, 2002).

The 1992 Sathin Bhanwari gang-rape case of Rajasthan illustrates the problems posed, in a situation of inadequate infrastructural support, by the shift from state to civil society for the renewal and regulation of democracy, whereby individuals were given agency to erase class/caste/community, gender/race and other structural differences. At the time, Bhanwari was working in her village, Bhateri, as a primary change agent—known as a sathin—for the Rajasthan government-run Women’s Development Programme. ² Her rape was a result of her involvement with an anti-child-marriage campaign launched by the government a fortnight before the festival of Akha Teej in which infants are given away in marriage. When Sathin Bhanwari heard that Ram Karan Gujar, the ward panch, planned to marry off his 1-year-old daughter on Akha Teej, she tried to dissuade him.

According to Sathin Bhanwari, on the evening of 22 September 1992 she was working in the fields with her husband, Mohan Lal, when five men, identified as Shravan Sharma, Ram Karan Gujar, Ram Sukh Gujar, Gyarsa and Badri, attacked him and beat him unconscious. Trying to go to her husband’s rescue, Bhanwari was held down by the first three named attackers, while the last two raped her in turn. They threatened her with death if she reported the incident to anyone (Abraham, 2002).

Sathin Bhanwari is from the Kumhar community, who are professional potters, while her rapists are Gujjars, cattle grazers and of a higher caste. Gujjars are also wealthy and politically well connected. In Bhateri, where the rape took place, the Gujjars are powerful, and so, given their interest in performing child marriages during Akha Teej, it is not surprising that Bhanwari got no support from the local village leaders. Today, 18 years later, the case is still pending in the Supreme Court. Sathin Bhanwari continues to live alongside her rapists in Bhateri village, where her family has been ostracised.

Dreze and Sen, when talking about India’s ‘multiple inequalities’, state that ‘it is the mutual re-inforcement of severe inequalities of different kinds that creates an extremely oppressive social system, where those at the bottom of these multiple layers of disadvantage live in conditions of extreme disempowerment’ (Dreze & Sen, 2013, p. 213). The Third Way’s move to regenerate public space by using the family and the community, separate from the structures of the state and the compulsions of the marketplace, to foster dialogic democracy and civil morality without addressing the intersections of caste, class and gender issues is very problematic.

Moreover, the shift from the public space (state, institutions) to the private (family, community) creates other problems. For one, given the fact that women’s responsibilities within patriarchal structures are confined primarily to the private space of the home, how would these responsibilities be transferred to the public space of the state to be quantified and assessed? For another, such a shift creates large terrains of unofficial politics that make it increasingly harder for women to fight established modes of official discourse that go against their interests. It denies women the possibility of engaging with policy makers on issues that concern them in the political and public realm, depriving them of institutional links. For example, feminists fighting for justice in the Sathin Bhanwari case are making policy makers aware that the functionaries of the state, such as politicians, judges and policemen, are all mired in the regional politics of caste, class and gender: five judges were changed during the course of the Sathin Bhanwari’s gang rape case, and it was the sixth judge who ruled in 1995 that the five accused were not guilty. The pronouncement of this district and sessions judge was shocking: ‘Rape is usually committed by teenagers. The alleged rapists here are middle-aged and therefore respectable citizens. Since the offenders were upper-caste men and included a Brahmin, the rape could not have taken place because Bhanwari was from a lower caste.’ ³

To re-invent the micro-dynamics of the family and the community as social units to bring about social change, there should be enabling mechanisms at the macro level. The neoliberal dynamics of globalisation does not allow for this (Callinicos, 2003). The inequities of caste, class and gender are made more complex in these units by the self-seeking, profit-oriented ways of globalisation, which make notions of dialogic democracy complex. Globalisation’s geographic dispersal of labour threatens family and community stability, as is seen in the employment by Western women of female, often foreign, domestic help. Even as globalisation offers employment opportunities for disadvantaged women it creates new fault lines among them through racialised, gendered, class-based labour. These fault lines impact in negative ways on the family unit that the Third Way sees as a re-distributive instrument for democratising democracy and civil morality. For instance, by moving from family to family due to economic compulsions the domestic maid unsettles the very idea of the rooted monogamous family as the basis for stability. While taking care of the host family either in her own country or abroad, she denies her own family similar care. Worse still, she is herself often exploited by the host family in varied ways (see Abraham, 2002; also see Young, 2000). Barbara Ehrenreich aptly points out that the micro-defeat of feminism opened a new door for women but, unfortunately, it was the back door of the domestic help (Ehrenreich & Russell, 2000).

Again, one of the greatest gains within globalisation for women in India has been economic openings. It has become possible for several housewives in India to earn through small entrepreneurial projects, ⁴ but though such projects proliferate, indicating a form of financial autonomy, they also point to the neoliberal economy’s retention of women’s jobs in sub-contracted home-based or unorganised sectors. Such spatial arrangements allow for wide-ranging exploitation of women by middle men, who demand longs hours of work for low wages. Many women agree to these exploitative conditions because they lack alternatives, or try to combine domestic responsibilities with income-generating work operating from the home (Boris & Prügl, 1996). Similarly, the notion of wage arbitrage, whereby big corporations seek low-paid foreign workers, is rampant within globalisation. Women fall into this category because of the lack of better alternatives. The argument that in availing of these economic opportunities women are, in a sense, breaking the constraints of family and community is not a valid one as the women are still functioning within the larger framework of patriarchy and capitalism and, what is worse, adjusting to its strategy of containment.

Studies conducted on young women workers in garment and electronic factories further reveal that many of them put in long hours of work in order to save money, often as dowry for their marriage. Some were forced to contribute substantial amounts of their savings towards household needs to retain their fast-disintegrating middle-class status (see Chhachhi, 1988). In globalisation’s macro-economic framework, the household is given the burden of the state’s budgetary cuts and deregulation of the market, and forced to absorb the fall-out of these financial adjustments. Women receive no compensation for the burden they are compelled to take on due to these structural adjustments (Prügl, 1996).

One of the main reasons why women carry a double workload as both housewife and employee is because the entrance of women into the public sphere of work has not coincided with a reverse shift by men (from the public to the private) in sharing domestic responsibilities. Technological revolution, it must be noted, while simplifying household chores for women, does not revolutionise the work associated with them. Technologies may have transformed certain kinds of work for the better for a certain class of women, but when it comes particularly to parenting, the burden still falls on the woman. Women who go out to work, which the growing demand of consumerism within the family necessitates, therefore carry a double load as both employee and housewife.

While patriarchal structures oppress women in the family, religious demands made by the community on women—particularly in the context of cultural purity within globalisation—broad-bases this oppression. For example, the Third Way pits religious fundamentalism against ‘globalising modernity’ and its absence of moral values, making globalisation a political and security problem. The Third Way argues for the need today of a ‘cosmopolitan morality’ in which ‘tolerance and dialogue can themselves be guided by values of a universal kind’ (Giddens, 2002, p. 50). The family and the community are the templates for this. But what are the enabling mechanisms that allow for the creation of a ‘cosmopolitan morality’ in the family and the community, both of which are steeped in class, gender and caste biases? It is also not clear who would be the deciding participants. Is there an equality of basis for evolving this ‘cosmopolitan morality’? Would marginalised groups such as the Dalits (the ‘untouchables’), and Dalit women in particular, have a say in these decision-making processes? Although women have a minimum share of 33 per cent (in some states as much as 50 per cent) in Panchayati Raj institutions, women’s share in the Indian parliament’s lower house, the Lok Sabha, is just 10 per cent (cited in Dreze & Sen 2013, p. 226).

Giddens, in the context of Third Way theories, talks of ‘disavowing’ the notion of agents in history, particularly ‘the metaphysical notion that history is “made” by the dispossessed’. He says, ‘There is no single agent, group or movement that, as Marx’s proletariat was supposed to do, can carry the hopes of humanity but there are many points of political engagement which offer good cause for optimism’ (Giddens, 1994, p. 21). What are these ‘many points of political engagement’? In today’s globalising world, these points with their ‘mobile configurations’ have become increasingly gendered and reformulate into strategic alliances among political and corporate business groups. Menon (2004, p. 8) demonstrates these ‘messy alignments’ by asking:

Why, for instance, has the increasingly popular Valentine’s Day become a target of violent attack by the Hindu right in India? For feminists who have been critical of both the notion of ‘romance’ as well as of the consumerism underlying Valentine’s Day, the Hindu right’s opposition brings into relief another aspect—the potentially subversive power of two individuals ‘in love’—oblivious (perhaps) of caste, class and religious identities. This potentially subversive character of romance is certainly a threat that the Hindu right takes very seriously. Conversely, of course, corporate globalisation can appropriate feminist slogans into traditional images of women. For instance, many consumer goods advertisements on March 8th have started celebrating it as the ‘Day of the Wife’.

In a multi-religious country like India, where the majority is Hindu, this can also lead to a form of ‘mono-communitarian’ politics of the worst kind (see Berglund, 2004). The Ayodhya episode, in which a 400-year-old mosque was brought down by Hindu fundamentalists, and the Godhra and post-Godhra ethnic violence between Hindus and Muslims are graphic examples of where ‘communitarian’ logic can lead. Women in general, and Muslims in particular, were the worst affected (see Chhachhi, 1988, also see Sarkar: http://www.indowindow.com/akbhar/article.php?article=99&category=2&issue=17).

The debate surrounding the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in India offers another example. Though it dates back to the 1940s and 1950s, it was foregrounded in 1985 with the Shah Bano case, in which a divorced Muslim woman filed an application under Section 125 of the Code for Criminal Procedures asking for maintenance rights from her husband. The debate essentially revolved around whether the Code for Criminal Procedure could apply to the Muslim community, which has its own personal laws. Feminists were appalled to find themselves aligned with the Hindu right-wing religious fundamentalists over the case. The right upheld the UCC, using it to project the laws of the Hindu majority community as the laws of the nation. The feminists were against personal laws as they divide women along religious lines and, worse, made the notion of justice a variable in consideration of the different patriarchal religious frames (Kapur & Cossman, 1999). This was the first time that feminists realised that women’s issues could not be resolved just through legal interventions, and that notions of equality and secularism had also to be seriously re-examined. ⁵

Menon continues to argue that if, in 2001, both the left and the right in the states of West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, respectively, came together to ban beauty contests, they did so more as a resistance to globalisation and its erosion of national/cultural purity rather than from any interest in retrieving women’s subjectivity from forms of objectification.

In other cultural and political contexts too, feminists have unwittingly joined hands with groups and institutions that were otherwise in opposition. In her essay ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’, Nancy Fraser argues a similar point in another cultural context, that of second-wave feminism in America, which emerged within the context of ‘state-organised capitalism’ at a particular point in the history of capitalism. America’s radical feminists joined hands with the New Left ⁶ in a critique of the state; that is, the New Left critiqued the state’s imperialist stance, while the feminists critiqued the androcentrism ‘of state-led capitalist societies in the postwar era’ (Fraser, 2009, p. 97). Over a period of time, however, this critique of the state by the feminists has fed into neoliberalism through ‘the cunning of history’. As she succinctly puts it, ‘the cultural changes jump-started by the second wave, salutary in themselves, have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society’. Fraser calls it ‘a new form of capitalism: post-Fordist, transnational, neoliberal’ (Fraser, 2009, p. 99).

The pioneering works of Butalia, Bhasin and Menon on women and the partition of India have already pointed out to us how the twin discourses of patriarchy and religion use women’s sexuality in defining the family’s and the community’s notions of honour and shame by marking women’s bodies, often in violent ways, in the name of both religion and culture (see Menon & Bhasin, 1998; also see Butalia, 1998). If this rhetoric became shrill in the 1990s, it was because it coincided with economic liberalisation in India and its threat of cultural imperialism. The ugly turn that cultural policing by the community can take was seen best in 2001 when Kashmir’s Islamic militant group, Lashkar-e-Jabbar, supported by the woman’s organisation Dukhtaraan-e-Millat, called for women to wear the veil in the Kashmir valley or face death. Although the source of this call was clouded in allegations and counter-allegations by the militants against the Indian state and its targeting of Kashmiri militancy, the call nevertheless had an impact on women. Several women in the Kashmir valley took to the veil. Interestingly, this call also encouraged Hindu and Sikh women to wear the veil and the bindi as protection against attack (Menon, 2004). As Menon remarks, ‘Clearly, when it comes to the marking of female bodies with cultural signs, the right wing is united across ideological lines. Additionally, there is the characteristic homogenisation of the Other (in this case, the non-Muslim) for, of course, the bindi is not worn by Sikh women’ (Menon, 2004, p. 2).

The statement ‘strong family ties can be an effective source of civic cohesion’ and is a way in which ‘democratisation connects directly with community development’ (Giddens, 1998), as stated by the Third Way, is too idealistic in the face of the existing reality of society’s fault lines, which are further sharpened by the macro-economic processes of neoliberalism. Third Way thinking must locate the family and the community within the global context of the restructuring of capital and also perceive capitalism as limiting the extent to which family and community can be reformed or regulated. ⁷

The Third Way’s definition of equality does not address the serious fault lines in society, but marginalises them further by giving certain privileged groups of individuals a head start over their more disadvantaged counterparts. ⁸ It talks of a ‘dynamic model of egalitarianism’ (Giddens, 1994, pp. 85, 120) for individuals, according to which equality is defined as ‘equality of opportunity’ in which ‘brute luck’—in terms of class, race, sex and other such privileges—cannot be penalised. ⁹ Such a definition of equality, according to the Third Way, ‘tends to produce high levels of social and cultural diversity, since individuals and groups have the chance to develop their lives as they see fit’ (ibid., p. 86). This is set against the socialist notion of ‘equality of outcome’ that does not give incentives to ‘those of talent to progress’. These are problematic theories in a world where people have structurally unequal positions. In India, with its historically marked class, caste and gender inequality, the Third Way’s definition of ‘equality of opportunity’ excludes vast groups of marginalised people. Arguably, women and Dalits would be the most relevant examples of exclusion from national and global resources of the already vulnerable.

Not surprisingly then, the educational packages offered by today’s globalising world are indicative not only of the exclusion of the under-privileged but also the refusal to see education as an instrument for developing citizens’ minds in a way that would lead to a critique of social formations based on exclusion and skewed forms of justice. Even when literacy programmes were offered in India to include the marginalised, such as in Education for All (a UN project) and the National Literacy Mission, they were unable to achieve their desired goals of literacy for all by 2000 because they coincided with neoliberalism’s structural adjustment programmes and the accompanying budgetary cuts. Moreover, these educational projects were short-term literacy programmes with no infrastructure to support their sustainability. In any case, neoliberalism advocates a competitive market economy that places people in diverse and contradictory ways.

The ‘generative politics’ of Third Way thinking insists on individual responsibility in reconstituting and fostering a ‘strong civic culture’ rather than reliance on the state as its provider (Giddens, 1999, p. 89). Such an approach deviates from the liberal democratic tradition that prioritises the individual’s rights vis-à-vis the state, which is seen as an instrument to protect these rights. The valorising of responsibilities over rights is, in essence, a way of minimising the need for comprehensive state-financed programmes and projects in the interests of the public. ¹⁰ Such policies do not necessarily re-invent the state but they re-orient it to the demands of neoliberalism. The diminished role of the state within globalisation has not necessarily empowered individuals. On the contrary, individuals are weaker and more vulnerable now than ever before (Heartfield, 2002).

One of the crucial questions that Piketty asks in his work Capital in the twenty-first century is: ‘What is the role of government in the production and distribution of wealth in the twenty-first century, and what kind of social state is most suitable for the age?’ (Piketty, 2014, p. 472). I state that nation-states should not surrender themselves completely to the changing global demands of capital. ¹¹ The 2008 crisis was the first of a series within ‘the globalised patrimonial capitalism of the twenty-first century. It is unlikely to be the last’ (ibid., p. 473).

We have to re-imagine and re-invent the state in the present changing context so that the very politics of family and community are not re-enacted by the capitalist, androcentric state, with all its oppressive ramifications on marginalised groups. Unless there are changes at the macro level, it is very hard for changes to take place at the micro level of family and community. Of course, the notion of state intervention raises different issues today than it did in earlier times because of the changed global economy. Key issues and challenges will emerge for the state in the 21st century, as, for example, the need for the state to contend with the serious problems of collection, distribution and organisation. It should set its rules and find its own distinctive path for development in an inclusive way so as to create a new ‘multi-scalar order that is democratic at every level’ (Fraser, 2009, p. 116).

In a country such as India, the areas of education and health will have to be prioritised. To argue that such prioritisation is old-fashioned and linked inextricably to the failed socialist project of the past overlooks ground-level reality. Why such areas, so important for participatory democracy, did not achieve their goals will also need to be studied.

In India, these services have been under the auspices of the state, but even several decades after independence they have not delivered to its citizens the goals enshrined in the constitution, namely equality, liberty and justice. Ironically, in India the poor and marginalised groups are more involved in the electoral processes than the middle classes and upper castes, and yet elected governments do not render these essential services to the very people who participate in the electoral process to bring them to power (Keefer & Khemani, 2004, p. 936). The Indian bureaucracy and its colonial trappings have been largely blamed for creating urban and rural pockets of official and unofficial power, which leads to poor accountability, lack of transparency and bad administration (Bhattacharya, 1989). The state has to stop playing the blame game and take responsibility for public well-being so as to create a good citizenry that can engage in participatory democracy.

The Euro-American version of Third Way theories is grossly inadequate in providing collectivist models for the state and its citizens precisely because it does not admit to the misfit within globalisation between collectivism and market models. Its reform discourse does not address the need for structural changes. In fact, the Third Way discourse on globalisation in both its theoretical packaging and its empirical practices reinforces the underlying argument that within globalisation the collectivist models of the state and its citizens have been replaced by direct links between individuals and the market forces.