Community emerged as a rather unexpected theme in debates about the governability of liberal, democratic and market-based societies in the closing decades of the end of the twentieth century. Some predicted that the collapse of state socialism in the Soviet Union and its allies would lead to an uncritical acceptance of neo-liberal individualism: of the economic arrangements, social institutions and political mechanisms espoused by the regimes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. These solutions have been adopted and promoted by the know-how funds and financial institutions of the West. But this hegemony has not been uncontested. The arts of welfare government in the West have certainly come under sustained attack. Yet those who advocate individualistic, market-based solutions to all the ills that welfare addressed have also been judged to be mistaken in their premises, inaccurate in their analyses and deficient in their strategies of government. Freed from the necessity to repeat the old battles between left and right, there has been a flowering of arguments which attempt to identify a ‘third way’ of governing. This is associated with the powers of a territory between the authority of the state, the free and amoral exchange of the market and the liberty of the autonomous, ‘rights-bearing’ individual subject. Whilst it begs many questions, let us call this space of semantic and programmatic concerns ‘community’.

There are different and competing versions of this ‘third space’.