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

'Education, education, education' : legal, moral and clinical

This article brings together Professor Donald Nicolson's intellectual interest in professional legal ethics and his long-standing involvement with law clinics both as an advisor at the University of Cape Town and Director of the University of Bristol Law Clinic and the University of Strathclyde Law Clinic. In this article he looks at how legal education may help start this process of character development, arguing that the best means is through student involvement in voluntary law clinics. And here he builds upon his recent article which argues for voluntary, community service oriented law clinics over those which emphasise the education of students

"Kultur" als Form symbolischer Gewalt: Grenzziehungsprozesse im Kontext von Migration am Beispiel der Schweiz

Die Schweiz gilt international als Modell eines gelungenen Multikulturalismus, dann nämlich wenn es das Zusammenleben der vier Sprachgruppen (Romands, DeutschschweizerInnen, TessinerInnen, RäteromanInnen) betrifft. Ein sprachlicher wie auch religiöser Pluralismus ist und war stets ein Grundbaustein des Selbstverständnisses der „Willensnation“ Schweiz. Geht es aber um MigrantInnen präsentiert sich die Geschichte anders, denn in diesem Falle erscheinen religiöse und ethnisch-kulturelle Pluralität vorwiegend als problematisch. MigrantInnen gehören entsprechend den öffentlichen und politischen Diskursen nicht zum multikulturellen Staat, vielmehr sind Prozesse kollektiver Grenzziehungen und damit Schließungsmechanismen zu beobachten, in denen Ethnizität, Religion und Kultur zu den wichtigsten Differenzierungsmerkmale werden, wie Gemeinsamkeiten gegen innen (SchweizerInnen) und Barrieren gegen außen (Ausländer, Migranten, Muslims, etc.) hergestellt werden. Ich argumentiere in diesem Kapitel, dass sich dieser „Kulturdiskurs“ im letzten Jahrzehnt verstärkt hat und gleichzeitig semantischen Verschiebungen unterworfen war. Mittels der Grenzziehungsperspektive wird historisch nachvollzogen, wie Zuwanderung und Integration in politischen Debatten und Gesetz zunehmend kulturalisiert und ethnisiert wurden. Ein Fallbeispiel aus der Forschung dient mir anschließend der Veranschaulichung dieser theoretischen Perspektive und dieses „neuen“ Essentialismus

The Choice of Ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France

A researcher or a journalist trying to compare the situation of ethnic and racial minorities in the United States and in France immediately confronts a crippling obstacle. The concept of ‘ethnic and racial minority’ as such is not used in France. This is not simply a matter of vocabulary –something the French typically like to argue about; the problem rather lies in the very incomparability of populations that one is talking about. Many of the categories that do exist in political discourse and public debate can of course be found in statistics. But there are no data describing the situation of minorities in France that could be compared with those produced in the United States. This state of affairs in French statistics – gathering has been the subject of major criticism for some 20 years now; it has gotten to the point that it has triggered a controversy of rare violence between those that would like to see statistics take into account the diversity of the population and those who denounce the danger that such statistics might pose of ethnicizing or racializing society. The media focus on the contentiousness of this debate has been such as to sometimes lose sight of the very existence of discrimination and the flaws of the Republican model that are at the root of the controversy in the first place