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

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

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

International audienc

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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Le Royaume-Uni doit-il sortir de l’Union européenne ?

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

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Le Royaume-Uni et l'Europe : toujours un malentendu ?

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Brexit, or Theresa May’s Headache

Theresa May has been faced with the complexities of negotiating how to leave the EU with her European partners while presiding over a divided Cabinet, party and country as a whole with no majority in Parliament since the failed June 2017 General Election. This two-level game, always a challenge, is made even more difficult by the fact that the future of the UK outside the EU was never really debated during the 2016 referendum campaign and that no consensus exists on the outcome of the negotiations