Liberal intervention in the foreign policy thinking of Tony Blair and David Cameron

David Cameron was a critic of Tony Blair’s doctrine of the international community, which was used to justify war in Kosovo and more controversially in Iraq, suggesting caution in projecting military force abroad while in opposition. However, and in spite of making severe cuts to the defence budget, the Cameron-led Coalition government signed Britain up to a military intervention in Libya within a year of coming into office. What does this say about the place liberal interventionism occupies in contemporary British foreign policy? To answer this question, this article studies the nature of what we describe as the ‘bounded liberal’ tradition that has informed British foreign policy thinking since 1945, suggesting that it puts a distinctly UK national twist on conventional conservative thought about international affairs. Its components are: scepticism of grand schemes to remake the world; instinctive Atlanticism; security through collective endeavour; and anti-appeasement. We then compare and contrast the conditions for intervention set out by Tony Blair and David Cameron. We explain the similarities but crucially also the vital differences between the two leaders’ thinking on intervention, with particular reference to Cameron’s perception that Downing Street needed to loosen its control over foreign policy-making after Iraq. Our argument is that policy substance, policy style and party political dilemmas prompted Blair and Cameron to reconnect British foreign policy with its ethical roots, ingraining a bounded liberal posture to British foreign policy after the moral bankruptcy of the John Major years. This return to a patient, pragmatic and ethically informed foreign policy meant that military operations in Kosovo and Libya were undertaken in quite different circumstances, yet came to be justified by similar arguments from the two leaders

2. The EU Referendum and the Crisis of British Democracy

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Britain and the Crisis in the European Union, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan

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La politique au Royaume-Uni

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Liberal intervention in the foreign policy thinking of Tony Blair and David Cameron

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The Elephant in the Room: Europe in the 2015 British General Election

Europe was hardly mentioned by the mainstream parties in the 2015 general election campaign in spite of the fact that its outcome was going to have a dramatic impact on whether an in/out referendum was going to be organised in the UK or not. For different reasons, it was not in the interest of either the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberal Democrats to make much use of the issue, leaving it to UKIP and, to a certain extent the SNP. In contrast to the election campaign, Europe is now going to dominate the political debate until the referendum takes place in 2016 or 2017

La Grande-Bretagne et l'Europe: le grand malentendu

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La politique au Royaume-Uni

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Tony Blair et les Etats-Unis : une vision du monde partagée

Tony Blair, malgré sa volonté de jouer un rôle actif et positif dans l'Union européenne, a fait le choix de suivre le gouvernement américain en Irak en 2003, créant de graves fractures avec ses partenaires européens. Cette priorité accordée à la « relation spéciale » avec les États-Unis n'est pas nouveau pour un Premier Ministre britannique, mais il l'a poussé plus loin que ses prédécesseurs, au risque d'une grande impopularité dans son propre pays. Cette décision s'explique par le parcours idéologique de Blair depuis 1997, qui a élaboré une doctrine de l'intervention humanitaire dès 1999 et l'a étendue à l'Irak. L'investissement passé (politique, économique et militaire) dans la relation spéciale était tel qu'il était peut-être difficile pour le Premier Ministre de faire un autre choix

La politique européenne de la coalition : nouvelle donne ou maintien de la tradition ?

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