Title of the PhD-Project
Social Justice in the Age of Globalisation and Anti-Globalisation: The Dilemma of the ‘Third Way’

The modernization that is currently being propagated in the social democratic parties of various European countries is presented as a reaction to fundamental socio-economic transformation processes within industrial societies and the global economy. The goal of this modernization process is to bring forth a “Third Way” distinct both from neoliberalism and from the statist, corporatist social democracy of the post-war era. In the course of redefining and realigning their fundamental policy programmes, social democratic parties have initiated a value discussion where the normative dimension of the core idea of social justice is open to question. The classical social democratic values of solidarity and equality have been successively abandoned and replaced with a semi-meritocratic, competition-oriented concept of fairness.
This study of “Legitimation Problems of late Social Democracy” should investigate the characteristics, content and platform of the social democratic redefinition of social justice that has taken place under the banner of the Third Way, taking as case studies the British Labour Party and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The main question here is the extent to which redefining the core idea of social justice serves to legitimize neoliberal economic policies, and thus accelerates the loss of member loyalty. This will be investigated by means of a comparison of programme development related to a political paradigm change.