ed. Richard Little and Mark Wickham-Jones
Manchester University Press, 2000,
£45 (hb), £15.99 (pb)
Herewith 260 pages of straight-faced academic endeavour come to the conclusion that New Labour’s foreign policy, ethical dimension and all, looks pretty much like the Foreign Office’s traditional foreign policy. Well! Who would have thought it?
Thus Rhiannon Vickers, ‘Labour’s search for a Third Way in foreign policy’, concludes (p. 43):
‘The Third Way as a compromise between free market capitalism and social democracy has little guidance to offer at the international level.’
Tim Dunne and Nicholas J. Wheeler, ‘The Blair doctrine: advancing the Third Way in the world’ conclude (p. 74):
‘The good intentions of assisting the independence of the East Timorese have been undermined completely by the fact that Labour did not take a principled stand on the question of arms shipments to Jakarta.’
Mark Wickham-Jones, ‘Labour Party politics and foreign policy’, concludes pp.109/110:
‘How could the claim about an ethical dimension be reconciled with the continuance of arms manufacturing so important to the UK economy? In retrospect, disappointment seemed inevitable’.
Will Bartlett: ‘”Simply the right thing to do”: Labour goes to war’, concludes p.144:
‘While the ethical foreign policy as applied to the Balkans was a well intentioned exercise in populist politics it failed to achieve the goals of either protecting the Kosovo Albanians from a humanitarian catastrophe or of establishing a multi-ethnic society in Kosovo after the war ended.’
Angela Bourne and Michelle Cini, ‘Exporting the Third Way in foreign policy: New Labour, the European Union and human rights policy’, conclude p.183:
‘We identified no evidence to support the view that the UK government used human rights as a hook upon which to hang its European policy……… the government’s reluctance to bring the “ethical” and “European” strands of its international policy together in practice and the limited impact of its Third Way in foreign policy at the EU level have left some of its key aspirations on the “ethical dimension” unfulfilled.’
All of which are polite academic ways of saying, ‘It’s all horse shit, mate, just horse shit’ – the discovery of which must be a revelation, right?