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Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are seeking a new middle ground.
Presidents and prime ministers are busy people, who rarely get the chance to relax together, to chat informally about the deeper social tides and economic currents that influence all that they do. Their time is severely rationed, their days governed by a strict agenda, and even a long bilateral meeting between old colleagues tends to become a brisk negotiating session on urgent issues. So whatever else "the third way" has achieved, it has transformed the personal relationships between a critical mass of American and European leaders.
The process began in September 1997, when the newly elected British Prime Minister Tony Blair spent a day in New York with President Clinton and Vice-President Gore talking about what they had in common. They were leaders of traditionally center-left parties who had come to power insisting that their parties had to change, that the old ideologies of left and right had little meaning in the post-cold war era. They had both embraced free markets and free trade and believed that the role and budgets of their governments had become too big, and too inefficient. But they also felt that the classic free enterprise theories of the Reagan-Thatcher years of conservative political dominance lacked something essential, perhaps a sense of community, perhaps a sense of compassion for those citizens who had not done well from stock market booms.
Since that first meeting between Clinton and Blair, the British prime minister has hosted a similar session with top aides and ministers. President Clinton organized another meeting, with Tony Blair and Italian premier Romano Prodi (now president of the European Commission) in September 1998, and another immediately after the 1999 NATO summit in Washington; this time the new German chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, and Canada's premier, Jean Chretien, joined the group. In Florence, Italy's former Communist prime minister Massimo D'Alema, who had perhaps made the longest ideological journey to this new politics of what Bill Clinton called "the dynamic center," organized a similar session, which was attended by French Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. And in Berlin last June, Chancellor Schroder ran another meeting, this time attended by Chile's newly elected moderate Socialist leader Ricardo Lopez.
These sessions...