The Labour Party and the world, volume 2

Labour's foreign policy since 1951

Rhiannon Vickers

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719067471
• eBook ISBN: 9781847795953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the second book in a unique two-volume study tracing the evolution of the Labour Party's foreign policy throughout the 20th century to the present date. This is the first comprehensive study of the history of the Labour Party's worldview and foreign policy. It argues that Labour's foreign policy perspective should be seen not as the development of a socialist foreign policy, but as an application of the ideas of liberal internationalism. Volume Two provides a critical analysis of Labour's foreign policy since 1951. It examines Labour's attempts to rethink foreign policy, focusing on intra-party debates, the problems that Labour faced when in power, and the conflicting pressures from party demands and external pressures. It examines attitudes to rearmament in the 1950s, the party's response to the Suez crisis and the Vietnam War, the bitter divisions over nuclear disarmament and the radicalisation of foreign and defence policy in the 1980s. It also examines Labour's desire to provide moral leadership to the rest of the world. The last two chapters focus on the Blair and Brown years, with Blair's response to the Kosovo crisis, to 9/11 and his role in the 'war on terror'. Whereas Blair's approach to foreign affairs was to place emphasis on the efficacy of the use of military force, Brown's approach instead placed faith in the use of economic measures. This highly readable book provides an excellent analysis of Labour's foreign policy. It is essential reading for students of British politics, the Labour Party, and foreign policy.

Chapter 1
Labour’s foreign policy approach

Traditional accounts of British foreign policy emphasise a bipartisan foreign policy consensus, characterised by the major members of the main political parties broadly agreeing with one another as to how foreign policy should be carried out. Any disagreements over policy therefore come from within the parties, for example from backbenchers, or in the case of the Labour Party, from party members as well.¹ While some authors have noted that the motivations of the political parties in foreign affairs were clearly different, they have still argued that their essential objectives were not.² Speaking in 1993, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd argued that ‘British foreign policy exists to protect and promote British interests. Despite all the changes in the world that underlying truth has not changed.’³ This study, however, works from the perspective that to argue that foreign policy basically stays the same, regardless of which party is in power, is overly deterministic, and that actors within the state can have an impact on foreign policy. Both internal and external factors and context are important, and political parties form part of the domestic context. The fact that the motivations of the two main parties are significantly different is in itself important, and has given rise to fundamentally different beliefs about foreign policy and the international system. These have affected the perception of what is in the national interest, as ‘State interests do not exist to be “discovered” by self-interested, rational actors. Interests are constructed through a process of social interaction.’⁴ As Finnemore has argued, ‘That process of defining interests is as intensely political and consequential as our subsequent efforts to pursue those interests’.⁵ As a result, it is possible to identify, at various time periods and on a variety of issues, a Labour foreign policy that is distinct from a more traditional foreign policy as advocated by the Conservative Party. This chapter begins by outlining what could be considered a ‘traditional’ view of British foreign policy, before moving on to outline the constitutive principles of Labour’s foreign policy approach.

Traditional British foreign policy

Traditional British foreign policy, Conservatives argued, was based on pragmatism. Conservatives defined international relations in terms of a realist worldview and this became the dominant framework for thinking about British foreign policy in the nineteenth century. They took a Hobbesian approach to relations between states, where there is no overarching authority able to maintain order within the international system, and so relations between states tend towards conflict as states seek constantly to maximise their military, economic and political power and calculate their interests in terms of power and ability to meet military threats. They did not believe in the ability to fundamentally change the international system. Unlike the Labour Party, the Conservatives have never had difficulty in defining the aim of their foreign policy, and that aim has always been to protect and promote the national interest. The national interest was seen as resting on enduring, timeless, geohistorical and geopolitical interests, as ideologically neutral, and, to a large extent, self-evident. In Britain’s case, these enduring interests included the geopolitical impact of Britain’s location as an island off the continent of Europe, its global reach across the Atlantic, its commercial basis as an island trading nation, and its reliance on naval power as an instrument of military influence.⁶ For example, as Britain is an island separate from the rest of Europe it has had an ambivalent relationship with the rest of Europe. This way of thinking of enduring geopolitical interests did not determine foreign policy, but it did affect the way in which foreign policy was thought about. For example, British foreign policy should be based on the protection of British interests, rather than promotion of values. In addition, British foreign policy was seen as the preserve of a policy-making elite, and implemented through the Foreign Office. Despite this agreement over the nature of foreign policy, Conservatives still tended, just like the Labour Party, to disagree about which policy will best meet the ends of protecting the British national interest. For instance, both Europhiles and Eurosceptics have argued that it is in the national interest to follow their respective line on relations with Europe.

Thus, Conservative foreign policy has been based on the pursuit and protection of national interests, rather than in terms of Britain’s obligations to the international community. The Conservative Party has not tended to promote its foreign policy as moral or based on ethical principles; as Douglas Hurd commented, foreign secretaries must deal with the world as it is and not how they would like it to be. However, they too have evoked the languages of rights and principles, and have taken the promotion of human rights as part of their international goals. While the Conservatives have worked through international organisations, they have sometimes been less avowedly supportive of them, in particular the United Nations (UN), than their Labour counterparts. The Conservatives have placed a strong emphasis on the Anglo-American relationship and have usually supported US policy, though this has not always been automatic; for instance, Thatcher caused consternation with the US for refusing to support their intervention in Granada in 1983.⁷

Obviously there will be some degree of consensus between the Conservatives and Labour as it is difficult for parties to make a difference when it comes to making foreign policy. Both parties have to deal with the same historical legacy of Britain as a former superpower and the economic and political consequences of Britain’s relative economic decline, and the realities of an increasingly interdependent world. Both parties have to make policy in relation to international events and circumstances, in the face of opportunities and pressures brought by the international system, and the network of international organisations, alliances and enmities, of which Britain is a part. Both parties have to make policy within the context of a domestic political system based on Parliamentary scrutiny and opposition. Both parties have to deal with the opposition of their own backbenchers and the influence of powerful interests and pressure groups. Frankel argued that while ‘On the fact of it, the British political system carries the risk of discontinuity in foreign policy caused by changes of government’, the reality of the committee system on which British government is based means that consensus and continuity has been the basis of British foreign policy.⁸ Wallace has noted how foreign policy issues rarely require legislation, ‘so that most proposals are spared the process of detailed discussion and possible amendment involved in a bill’s passage through Parliament.’ This means that domestic interests, including parties, have less impact on foreign policy, and the government’s relative freedom from the need to gain parliamentary sanctions limits informed debate and the exercise of political influence.⁹

Despite the convergence at times over Conservative and Labour foreign policy, there have also been fundamental differences between them. If Conservatives worked within the realist tradition of international relations, Labour took a ‘transformationalist’ view of international relations, believing that it was possible for the context of relations between states to change and hence for the fundamental basis of British foreign policy to change.¹⁰ Labour has been, for much of its history, ideologically opposed to traditional foreign policy. Attlee said that ‘There is a deep difference of opinion between the Labour Party and the Capitalist parties on foreign as well as home policy, because the two cannot be separated. The foreign policy of a Government is the reflection of its internal policy.’¹¹ These differences arose from the fundamental belief that for Labour, there should be congruity been domestic and foreign policy, in particular between a democratic political system and a democratic foreign policy. Linked to this was the need for legitimacy in foreign policy. The Conservatives, however, have tended to see domestic and foreign policy as separate entities, and this is at the heart of the fundamental differences between the analytical framework with which traditional and Labour foreign policies have developed.

The Labour Party, unlike the Conservatives, has always had a problem concerning the fundamental purpose of British foreign policy. As we have seen, the Conservative Party has been content to present foreign policy as the pursuit and protection of British interests, as the playing out of power politics. There might be disagreements over how to implement this, but the underlying values remain the same. While Margaret Thatcher introduced a more ideological stance to Britain’s foreign policy with her ‘megaphone diplomacy’, at the heart of this was the protection of Britain’s interests.¹² The Labour Party, however, has historically found this conception of foreign policy problematic, wanting to go beyond it with a call for foreign policy to be based upon moral purpose. This has been for two main reasons.

First, the Labour Party has tended to encompass a wider spectrum of political opinions than the Conservative Party, and, with its emphasis on party democracy, has given greater importance to its extra-parliamentary institutions of policy-making. This has acted as a constraint on the party leadership. As outlined in Volume 1 of this study, given the Labour Party’s ideological and representational beginnings, and, particularly in its early years, the belief that the principles guiding domestic policy could be projected on to the international arena, different factions within the party have pulled foreign policy in different directions. There were five main influences on the early Labour Party. These were the trade union movement; the Independent Labour Party; the Social Democratic Federation, a British Marxist group; the Fabian Society; and radical Liberals, epitomised by the members of the Union of Democratic Control. Each of these groups had its own particular influence over the way that foreign policy and international affairs were thought about. Each had their own particular analytical framework for understanding relations between states, and each their own way of responding to concrete situations. These different influences provided a rich source for ideas on international politics, but also produced impulses towards Labour’s appropriate response to particular foreign policy issues which were sometimes antithetical to each other. This has added to the problems of developing a typology of the British Labour Party’s foreign policy, while also explaining in part the depth of the some of the intra-party conflict on international affairs.

For believers in class struggle, the Labour Party’s role was to protect working-class interests, internationally as well as nationally, and to promote international working-class solidarity and socialist internationalism. The radical Liberals contributed greatly to Labour’s liberal internationalism, including the belief in self-determination, international justice, and in the workings of international organisations such as the League of Nations and the UN. For the ethical socialists and Nonconformists, pacifism and anti-militarism were important components of their worldview. The Independent Labour Party and the radical Liberals reinforced each other in their belief that militarism and secret diplomacy were the causes of war. Some of the radical Liberals influenced the Marxist perspective on the economic basis of inter-capitalist rivalry. These different contributing streams to Labour’s foreign policy often pulled in opposing directions, as evinced by the split over how to respond to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, or debates over rearmament in the early 1930s.¹³

The second main reason for Labour’s search for a foreign policy that involves more than the protection of national interests has been that, for extensive periods in the twentieth century, Labour’s foreign policy has developed while the party has been in opposition rather than in power. The Labour Party was born out of domestic political discontent and its policies tended to reflect this. As such, foreign policy developed more as a response to the internal dynamics of the party, the tensions between left and right factions, rather than as a response to international events and experience of governance. The result of this has been that Labour has tended to promise an alternative foreign policy when in opposition, seeking a new formulation of foreign policy based on principles that reflect party opinion with an in-built suspicion of power politics. It then finds that once in government, the opinions of rebellious backbenchers become rather less significant than pressures that governments come under from other nations, international organisations, existing commitments, international events, and the consequences of earlier foreign policy decisions, and so this results in a changed foreign policy stance. This problem even led to the situation during the 1974 to 1979 governments where on issues of defence, the Labour Party ended up with two very different defence policies, the one that was voted for by activists at the annual conference and was contained in the 1974 election manifestos, and the one that was actually implemented by the Labour government.

The tensions over foreign and defence affairs have been apparent throughout the Labour Party’s history, and reveal themselves in recurring issues and themes. The main premise has been that Labour should offer an alternative to the traditional, power politics or realist approach of British foreign policy, which had stressed national self-interest. This alternative was internationalism, which stressed co-operation and interdependence, and a concern with the international as well as the nat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Labour’s foreign policy approach
• 2 The 1950s: new conflicts, rearmament and the bomb
• 3 The Wilson governments, 1964–1970
• 4 Defence and foreign policy in the 1970s
• 5 The radicalisation of Labour’s foreign and defence policy in the 1980s
• 6 New Labour triumphs
• 7 Labour’s foreign policy in the 21st century
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index