legacy might be most lasting. It was not that he had a well-worked design
for foreign policy when he became Prime Minister; or that he was particularly well-informed on international affairs. He was said to travel light
into global politics. But he had clear instincts, he had luck on his side in
the early years, and he was determined in this, as in other fields, to find
new ways of achieving old objectives. He both honoured the erstwhile
continuity of British foreign policy and traduced it by effectively reinterpreting its goals. Part of that reinterpretation was driven by his perception of what he was inheriting. There seemed to be some easy, early gains
to be made.
The legacy of Conservative foreign policy
The Conservative foreign policy that Tony Blair inherited was characterised by a realist orthodoxy based on a strong, Thatcherite, conception
of nationhood and sovereignty. Foreign policy was fundamentally orientated to the politics and economics of European, Mediterranean, and
Transatlantic spheres, with a hard-nosed concentration on trade and
commerce elsewhere. This was logical enough in the circumstances of the
Thatcher era, but was clearly under pressure in the circumstances of the
mid-1990s. The realist orthodoxy had become a default position – and a
purely reactive one at that – in the difficult years of the Major governments. The end of the Cold War had not just defused the central antagonism of the age; it had affected politics and economics in every sphere of
Britain’s external interests. The influence of the Asian economies and the
changes they wrought in the nature of overseas economic competition
were clearly evident by 1997, if not fully appreciated within government.
The politics of Europe had become the politics of an enlarging Europe, as
the locus of influence shifted away from the Franco–German–British triangle. The collapse of Yugoslavia had already indicated that European
security was a quite different game, and other crises around the world
between 1991 and 1997 – in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Chechnya, and
Albania – had all indicated that weak and failing states created the instabilities that most severely tested the major powers’ foreign and security
policies.
Not least, the United States itself was uncertain how it should play its
role as the sole remaining superpower. The victorious war to liberate
Kuwait in 1991 had not consolidated George H.W. Bush at home, nor
augmented the US position abroad. The Clinton presidency was marked
by liberal internationalist ideas but vacillation in the way they were
implemented. It was characterised by some as ‘the crisis of liberal internationalism’.1 Partly out of sheer exasperation, the 1994–97 period
marked the beginnings of a decisive shift in the US towards unilateralist
approaches to global politics.2
So rapid a process of global change in this environment of foreign
policy would have taxed the ingenuity of any British government, let
alone a fourth term administration struggling to maintain its unity. As it
was, it left the government with a foreign policy that was by no means
unsuccessful, but which looked increasingly out of kilter, and out of
step, with the times. The government took a strong line in backing the
results of the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait. It could hardly do otherwise.
The operation of the ‘No-Fly Zones’ over northern and southern Iraq
had to be maintained, though their purpose had clearly altered after the
first two years. Another crisis in 1996 resulted in a concerted allied
bombing campaign in Iraq, and France withdrew from the operation in
the most public breakdown of the transatlantic consensus on Iraq. In
Conservative thinking, the war and subsequent air operations – even
including later bombing raids around Baghdad – had taken on a
Falklands-style commitment to international law and the authority of the
11 Stanley Hoffman, World Disorders: Troubled Peace in the Post-Cold War Era (New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 70–86.
12 Michael Cox, ‘American Power before and after September 11’, in R. Singh (ed.),
Governing America: The Politics of a Divided Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), pp. 467–79. Andrew Bacevich, American Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2002).
United Nations.3 In parallel, Britain welcomed all efforts the US could
make to address the Israel/Palestinian problem and warmly welcomed
US (and Russian) guarantees behind the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993.
There was relief, and support, too for the eventual efforts the US made
effectively to impose a peace agreement on Bosnia in 1995 and begin a
long-term commitment to make it stick.4 In 1997 the Conservatives faced
the election campaign with a strong statement that argued, with some
consistency, that foreign policy was based on a conception that ‘the
nation state is a rock of security . . . a precious source of stability’ and that
maintenance of our efforts to promote peace in former Yugoslavia,
Kashmir, Cyprus and the Middle East, to reform the UN and to help
enlarge NATO and the European Union, constituted a pragmatic and
realist international policy.5
But this realist consistency was not, by then, based on strong international foundations. There was a reluctance to engage with the uncomfortable realities of modern interdependence and to recognise the effects of
this on conceptions of sovereignty. Some Conservatives lamented this
failure but, in truth, there was no enthusiasm for a reorientation towards
less tangible sources of power and stability, nor a Whitehall structure that
would promote it.6 The concentration on a ‘partnership of nations’ conception of Europe’s future was an understandable reaction to a vigorous
intra-party debate on Europe that had only really impacted on the
Conservative parliamentary party during the 1990s.7 It was also consistent with the Thatcherite legacy and then the numbing effects of being
forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. Whilst understandable, the approach nevertheless served to distract the government from
embracing the bigger changes taking place in Europe. The startling effects
of the commitment to enlargement after 1994 at once reinforced a ‘partnership of nations’ image of a much larger ‘Europe’ but also initiated major shifts in the transatlantic relationship that were later to be
characterised, accurately enough, as a dichotomy between ‘old’ and ‘new’
13 William Hague, ‘Blair’s Lack of Leadership on Atlantic Alliance’, Speech 20 February 2001,
Conservative Central Office, www.conservatives.com/tile.do?defϭnews.story.page&obj_
idϭ674&speechesϭ1.
14 Ivo H. Daalder, Getting to Dayton: The Making of America’s Bosnia Policy (Washington,
DC., Brookings Institution Press, 2000), pp. 15–27.
15 Conservative Party Manifesto 1997, Our Vision for Britain (London: Conservative Central
Office, 1997), Chapter 9.
16 David Howell, ‘Britannia’s Business’, Prospect, 15, 15 January 1997.
17 Nicholas J. Crowson, The Conservative Party and European Integration since 1945: At the
Heart of Europe? (
London: Routledge, 2006), p. 45.
Europe. The transatlantic bridge between the US and Europe that most
Conservative leaders felt they naturally represented was becoming more
difficult to manage. The effort to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq seemed
to be drifting towards an aimless antagonism from which most European
states wanted to disengage. The Oslo peace process was running out of
credibility even as President Clinton’s own political authority slipped
away in repeated scandal after 1995. The Europeans remained resentful,
too, at the divisions the Balkan crises had opened up in transatlantic relations. The Dayton Peace Accord of 1995 was holding, but there remained
great doubts about its long-term viability and anger at the way the
Europeans had been brushed aside in its conclusion. On all these fronts
the Conservative government was locked into reactive mode. At one side
of the transatlantic bridge there was growing awareness, certainly in
Paris, Berlin and Rome, of a gap in the shared international interests that
had united the Western allies so well in the past.8
At the other end of the transatlantic bridge the government was unable
to invigorate its relations with Washington in a way that suggested real
influence. The Bush and Clinton administrations instinctively leant
towards Germany as the keystone decision-maker in Europe and preferred a bilateral relationship with Chancellor Kohl rather than some
mediated position via London. And while the British had been the most
critical of Clinton’s ‘lift and strike’ recipe for dealing with Bosnia at arm’s
length, it was France, nevertheless, that finally pressured Washington into
meaningful involvement in the summer of 1995. Even on Iraq, the British
privately felt they were in a cul de sac simply to support the US. Britain
was a loyal, but not influential, ally in these critical transition years at the
end of the Cold War.
Nor had John Major been able to make a personal success of his relations with George H.W. Bush or with Bill Clinton. The decision of the
White House to receive Gerry Adams in March 1995 caused great irritation in Downing Street. For several days John Major reportedly refused
to take calls from the President.9 In 1996 there were allegations in
Washington that the British government was involved in efforts to discredit the Clinton election campaign with material from Clinton’s
days as a Rhodes Scholar. There was little in these years of traditional
18 Philip H.Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, Allies at War: America, Europe and the Crisis over
Iraq (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), pp. 34–6.
19 Reported in an interview with Bill Clinton, ‘Mandela helped me survive Monicagate,
Arafat could not make the leap to peace – and for days John Major wouldn’t take my calls’,
The Guardian, 21 June 2004.
Anglo-American summitry or assertions of political kinship. British
policy seemed increasingly to offer little more than highly constrained
reaction to vacillating US behaviour; a far cry from the Reagan-Thatcher
era when so many ambitious things had seemed possible.
Such a reactive policy of realist orthodoxy left a good deal of room for a
Labour challenge. Continuity from one administration to the next is a
characteristic of British foreign policy, but by 1997 New Labour could
claim not only that policy was not being implemented competently
enough – a typical charge – but also that it was predicated on an out-dated
view of the global environment – a much more challenging contention.
Conservative policy had been duly conservative. Security and defence
policy was altering piecemeal in a series of quite large, ad hoc steps that
were justified carefully enough in the Ministry of Defence but never
derived from a governmental overview of the totality of Britain’s new
external relations.10 Foreign policy was struggling to cope with the strains
in transatlantic relations, a concentration on Europe and the
Mediterranean that was replete with nothing but crises and dislocation,
and a failure either to extricate itself from Middle East entanglements or
to affect the US’s ability to deal with them. It was not clear what the government felt about foreign involvements in this global hiatus. On the one
hand it had been pulled into Bosnian operations without clear political
objectives – for which it was roundly criticised by all sides. On the other
hand it shared the international determination to stand out of any
Rwandan involvement – for which it was guiltily criticised by all sides.
Realist orthodoxy was proving difficult to apply in the world of the 1990s.
It was based on an implicit faith in the value of Britain, as an independent
state, doing what it could to uphold the institutions, alliances and diplomatic norms that had stood the test of time and were now in the process of
rapid transition. But there was no consistent philosophy behind all this;
no overview of the world and Britain’s place within it, beyond a recognition of the need to ‘cope’ in increasingly new and difficult circumstances.
It was an approach that New Labour could cast in very negative terms.
A decade of Labour’s foreign policy
In fact, Tony Blair characterised the foreign policy approach he inherited
as ‘a doctrine of benign inactivity . . . the product of the conventional
view of foreign policy since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This view holds
10 See, Andrew Dorman, Defence Under Thatcher (London: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 156–63.
that there is no longer a defining issue in foreign policy.’11 For the Prime
Minister and his new government, the world of foreign policy was full
of defining issues. Ideas evolved, inevitably, over the course of the
decade and were made to appear more consistent in 2007 than they were
in 1997. The controversies over the Iraq War drove Blair’s government to
‘define’ its foreign policy challenges much more stridently after 2003.
Nevertheless there was, from the beginning, a distinct world view at the
root of Labour’s foreign policy, embodied in both a style and a substance
that marked it out from what had gone before. It was characterised by
three interconnected sets of principles that shaped the way the government looked at the conflicting trends the changing international environment threw up at it. These principles were reportedly articulated in a
2006 cabinet paper discussing the decade of Labour’s foreign policy.12
The first set of principles was embodied in the headline that British
foreign policy should fundamentally concern values. This was no mere
assertion of virtue or pious idealism. It certainly went a good deal further
than reorientations at the Foreign Office that aimed to emphasise the
‘ethical dimensions’ of British foreign policy. It was based more broadly
on a particular analysis of the way globalised interdependence was
thought to operate. ‘It is by furthering our values that we further our
interests in the modern era of globalisation and interdependence’, said
Blair in 2007.13 ‘Idealism bec
omes realpolitik’.14 In such a world ‘soft’
power – the power of information, of culture, of economic magnetism, of
persuasion and imitation, of norms and rules – all comes down to an
ability to project certain values into other societies. In the case of Western
powers such values can be simply stated as ‘liberty, democracy, tolerance
and justice’.15 This values/interests nexus was backed up by a belief in
further liberalisation within the world economy. Only economic liberalism would allow societies to cope with globalisation and benefit from it;
for the poor as well as the rich, disruptive as that may be for both. The
constraints that globalisation places on all state actors – the openness it
irresistibly promotes – gives them a bigger stake in shared rules and
agreed procedures.16 Nor was the ‘national interest as values’ approach
11 Tony Blair, A Global Alliance for Global Values (London: The Foreign Policy Centre, 2006),
p. 10.
12 Reported in, Tony Blair, ‘Our Nation’s Future’, Lecture delivered 12 January 2007, 10
Downing Street, Press Office, Text.
13 Ibid.
14 Tony Blair, ‘A Battle for Global Values’, Foreign Affairs, 86.1, 2007: 90.
15 Blair, A Global Alliance for Global Values, p. 7.
16 Tony Blair, ‘What I’ve Learned’, The Economist, 31 May 2007, pp. 29–31.
confined to soft power. There were any number of challenges to these
values in hard-edged political and military terms; from Russia and other
post-communist societies who were becoming disillusioned with their
transition, from rogue leaderships around the world, from radicalised
Islamic groups – which, to his credit, Blair recognised as a challenge
almost from the beginning. Values may have to be fought for with military power.17 The world, in this view, is not an essentially benign environment for the major powers, who could choose to exercise their
consciences and get involved, or not, in the Bosnias or the Rwandas. It is
a world in which there is a clash, not between civilisations, but rather
about civilisation; about the willingness to embrace a liberal democratic
capitalist world order on a globalised scale. From this perspective, noninvolvement in this struggle is not an exercise in ‘realist orthodoxy’ that
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