New Labour: A Witness History

This article is the edited transcript of a witness history seminar which brought together high profile ‘insiders’ and ‘outside’ academic commentators to reflect critically on New Labour’s governance of Britain, 1997-2010. The contributions cover major areas of government activity, notably the economy, industrial policy, social justice, energy policy, ‘Europe’, military intervention, the use of intelligence and government decision-making. In their respective area of expertise, the contributors investigate the Conservative legacy seen through the eyes of New Labour people, the policies New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown tried to put in place, what changes these policies were intended to bring about and, finally, what the overall balance sheet of achievements was. The concluding section draws out the key domestic and foreign policy lessons learned during the New Labour years. The article presents a fascinating collection of findings that will be hugely relevant to Ed Miliband’s Labour Party as it gears up for the 2015 general election and after

Constructing a 'great' role for Britain in an age of austerity: Interpreting coalition foreign policy, 2010-2015

This article interprets the ideational underpinnings of the British Conservative-Liberal coalition government’s foreign policy from 2010 to 2015. It uses qualitative discourse analysis of speeches, statements and policy documents to unpack the traditions of foreign policy thought which informed some of the key foreign policy practices of the coalition government. The analysis centres on the British identity constructed by liberal Conservatives, and the values and interests flowing from this baseline identity that the government’s foreign policy sought to express through its foreign policy. Liberal Conservative foreign policy is argued to have been an attempt to come to terms with the limits on Britain’s international agency in the face of three major foreign policy dilemmas: the legacy of the New Labour years; dramatically reduced economic resources in the ‘age of austerity’; and an increasingly restricted capacity for Britain to exercise ideational entrepreneurship in the international community. The article substantiates the claim in the extant literature, that liberal Conservatism significantly adapted but did not restructure an established British foreign policy tradition of merging values and interests in complex ways

Interpreting foreign policy: National, comparative and regional studies

This Special Issue advances an interpretive research programme into Foreign Policy Analysis and International Relations by showcasing new work on the study of foreign policy and regional cooperation. This introductory article explains the rationale and contents of the Special Issue in three parts. The opening part explains how the contributions complement the broader study of ideas in Foreign Policy Analysis and International Relations through a critique of methodological positivism in the social sciences. The second part elaborates the theoretical framework used to cohere the collection, which centres on the study of ‘situated agents’ who, when confronted with policy dilemmas, draw on inherited traditions to inform their foreign policy practices. This is accompanied by a methods case study centring on David Cameron’s European Union referendum strategy, which is used to illustrate the practical ways in which one can conduct interpretivist research into foreign policy. In conclusion, we spell out how the contributors conducted their work to advance the interpretivist research programme

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

Covert action failure and fiasco construction: William Hague’s 2011 Libyan venture

In 2011 William Hague, then British Foreign Secretary, authorized a Special Forces team to enter Libya and attempt to contact rebels opposed to Muammar Gaddafi in the unfolding civil war. However, its members were detained by the rebels, questioned and ejected from the country. This article puts the literature on public policy failures into dialogue with that on covert action as a tool of foreign policy. It asks: why did this not develop into a fully-fledged policy fiasco when journalists and politicians alike judged it to have been a major error of judgement on Hague’s part? Using narrative analysis of the contemporary reporting of this incident, we argue that the government – possessing the advantage of information asymmetry accruing from operational secrecy – was ultimately able to win the battle of narratives in a frame contestation process. The study of information asymmetry can enhance the recently revivified research into foreign policy failures