The Labour Party, War and International Relations, 1945-2006
Mark Phythian
London: Routledge, 2007, £19.99, p/b
Reviewed by:
Bernard Porter
The title of this book is slightly misleading – at any rate, it misled me. I was expecting a broader treatment of Labour’s debates over issues of war and foreign relations, which would have included colonial wars, for example – hugely important for much of Phythian’s period – and over international relations about other things than war – like the European Union. Instead we have chapters on the Cold War, the Korean War, Suez, Vietnam, the Falklands, the first Gulf War, the Bosnian and Kosovo interventions, and the present Iraq war, only; whose main purpose seem to be to explain how Labour foreign policy has metamorphosed so drastically recently, into its present ‘humanitarian interventionist’ guise. In other words, it is a tract for our times.
There can be little doubt about the scale of the shift. In chapter one of the book Phythian lists the characteristic features of the Labour approach to foreign policy for most of the party’s history. First among these he places ‘insistence on the primacy of the United Nations’ (after 1945). Then come ‘suspicion of power politics and secret diplomacy’; ‘anti-colonialism’; the idea that war should be a ‘last resort’ only; ‘morality’; and a ‘suspicion of US motives’. By 2003 most of those had gone out of the window, except perhaps ‘morality’; but that of course is the slipperiest of them all. There were countervailing tendencies, especially on the party’s right. One was the pro-Americanism of many top Labour people; Phythian is interesting on Healey’s, in particular. Another was anti-fascism, which could cause brainstorms, as over the Falklands, when socialists were asked to choose between it and their prime anti-colonial instincts. Bevin, of course, was consumed with anti-communism. Both he and others were reluctant to give up the British Empire lightly. Yet others were concerned that all this pro-UN, anti-war stuff might make the party appear electorally ‘weak’.
Even the notions of ‘humanitarian interventionism’ and ‘preventive wars’ go back long before Blair: Phythian for example quotes Kinnock wanting to finish Saddam off preemptively in 1991; and there’s a clear if minority ‘humanitarian interventionist’ tradition in the party that goes back to the 1900s. (Then it was called ‘liberal imperialism’. Phythian goes back some way before 1945 for the ‘roots’ of the ideologies he is describing, but not quite far enough to pick this up.) That is why the party was always scrapping over foreign policy issues; indeed, from its very origins, in 1900 – the height of the Boer War. (Phythian doesn’t pick this up either.) Still, there was a pretty general consensus over the UN and the ‘last resort’ points in particular; even as late as 1999, when we find them still embedded in the famous ‘five criteria’ Blair listed to justify military action, in principle, against other powers.
In the event Blair’s support for the USA’s Iraq war directly contravened at least four of those criteria, with results that show how wise they were. When it comes to this part of his story Phythian narrows his focus down to Blair himself, on the grounds that this was a very personal decision, enabled by all kinds of factors – his ‘presidential’ style of government, the Opposition not opposing, Labour MPs not daring to rock the boat of a ‘winning’ leader, cabinet pusillanimity – but fundamentally rooted in a system of beliefs or values which had almost no connection with the mainstream of Labour tradition, but was peculiarly his own. Here his religion may have been more important than we realised at the time, especially his belief that it was only his God he was responsible to: an odd position for a democratic politician to take; his arrogance; his more than Healeyite pro-Americanism; his limited interest in or experience of foreign policy issues before Kosovo, which had a disproportionate impact on his thinking; and his desire to appear ‘tough’. ‘I couldn’t help feeling TB was relishing his first blooding as PM’, wrote one of his spin doctors in his diary during the 1998 US-UK air strikes on Iraq (my italics). Who said personalities don’t matter in history?
This of course is where this book has been leading up to; and it does the job of putting present-day Labour foreign policy in some of its context very well. If it had been the book I was expecting it would have had more context: on the intensive and draining wars Britain fought in South-East Asia, Cyprus, East Africa and elsewhere in the 1950s and ’60s, for example, and the Labour response to them; on other issues that clearly bore on the question of war, like decolonisation, Europe, and the economy; on possible extraneous influences, like business and the intelligence community; on strands of Labour opinion outside the parliamentary party – trade unions, Fabians, pressure groups, and at constituency level; and a little further back in time. In particular I feel that a book about Labour foreign policy that doesn’t discuss imperial issues – ‘Empire’, ‘British Empire’, ‘imperialism’, ‘colonies’, ‘decolonisation’, ‘India’ and ‘Africa’ don’t even feature in the index – is a bit like Hamlet without …….well, at any rate, Gertrude. One plausible alternative interpretation of Blair’s foreign policy, of course, is to see it as a resurrection of the British imperialism of old. (Vide his Bangalore speech of January 2002.) But you can’t have everything; and within its limits this is a fine, clear and (so far as Blair is concerned) a damning book.
Bernard Porter’s latest book is a new edition of his Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge.