The Second World War was a watershed moment in foreign policy for the Labour Party in Britain. Before the war, British socialists had held that nationalism was becoming obsolete and that humanity was steadily evolving towards the ideal of a single world government. The collapse of the League of Nations destroyed this optimistic vision, compelling Labour to undertake a fundamental review of its entire approach to foreign affairs during a period of unprecedented global crisis. This book traces the controversy that ensued, as the British democratic left set about the task of defining the principles of a radically new international system for the postwar world. The schemes proposed by Labour policymakers during these years encompassed a wide variety of political institutions aiming at the restraint or supersession of the sovereign nation-state. What they shared in common, however, was a reconceptualization of British identity, in which the hyper-patriotism of the wartime period blended with the left's traditional internationalism. This new 'muscular' internationalism was to have a major impact upon the evolution of entities as diverse as the United Nations Organizations, the British Commonwealth and the accelerating campaign in favor of European unity after Labour assumed the reins of government in 1945. Breaking with the traditional accounts that place Cold War tensions at the centre of the Attlee government's activities in the immediate postwar years, R.M. Douglas's book provides an entirely new framework for reassessing British foreign policy and left-wing concepts of national identity during the most turbulent moment of Britain's modern history. This book will be essential reading for all students and researchers of British foreign policy, the Labour Party and international relations.

This book describes how, after the Second World War, the Labour Party assumed leadership of the International Socialist Movement, thanks to the achievements of the Attlee Government. International Secretary Denis Healey guided the reconstruction of the Socialist International through the early Cold War, making the British vision for socialist internationalism prevail over the French and Belgian. At first, the provisional Socialist International (International Socialist Conference and Comisco) supported cohabitation with pro-communist socialists and the USSR, but with the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe it committed to militant anti-communism. Ambiguity between the Labour Party and Labour Government influenced British policy in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy and Poland, while the characterization and stereotypes of Eastern and Southern Europe shaped the language and actions of the British. Furthermore, the book shows how international contacts and the British and Swedish model encouraged the transition of socialist parties to responsible government parties fully embracing Western democracy and prepared the ideological revision of the 1950s.

After 13 years in power, Labour suddenly returned to being the party of opposition in 2010. This new edition of A History of the British Labour Party brings us up-to-date, examining Gordon Brown's period in office and the Labour Party under the leadership of Ed Miliband. Andrew Thorpe's study has been the leading single-volume text on the Labour Party since its first edition in 1997 and has now been thoroughly revised throughout to include new approaches. This new edition: - Covers the entirety of the party's history, from 1900 to 2014. - Examines the reasons for the party's formation, and its aims. - Analyses the party's successes and failures, including its rise to second party status and remarkable recovery from its problems in the 1980s. - Discusses the main events and personalities of the Labour Party, such as MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson, Blair and Brown. With his approachable style and authoritative manner, Thorpe has created essential reading for students of political history, and anyone wishing to familiarise themselves with the history and development of one of Britain's major political parties.

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS AN NJR AND BLURB SHOULD NOT BE USED IN ITS RAW FORM: From 1918 to 1945 the British Labour Party worked closely with some of the biggest names in international relations (IR) scholarship. Through such structures as the Advisory Committee on International Questions IR scholars were instrumental in the construction of Labour foreign policy, and the experience of working closely with Labour's leadership influenced the approach to IR taken by these scholars. One of the major effects of the collaboration of Labour with IR experts was a wealth of memoranda, reports and pamphlets written by IR scholars for the Party. This material, despite its relevance to the history of the discipline of IR, has received scant attention in modern IR scholarship. This study has three major goals. The first is to add to the literature on the study of Labour foreign policy by examining the crucial role played by IR theorists and writers. The Advisory Committee and its intellectual members did much to shape the foreign policy of the Party, giving it a coherent approach to international problems. The second is to put the international theories of five key writers - Leonard Woolf, H, N. Brailsford, Philip Noel Baker, Norman Angell and David Mitrany - into the context of both the development of Labour's international policy, and the evolution of the international environment between the wars. Although all five writers are acknowledged as key thinkers in this period, the memoranda on foreign affairs that they did for the Labour Party are little known within IR. The final goal is to demonstrate the inadequacy of the current interpretation within IR of the inter-war period. The obsession with the anachronistic division between realism and idealism - terms that had different connotations before the Second World War - masks both the very different debates that were going on at the time, and the changing international landscape of the inter-war period itself.

This is the second book in a unique two-volume study tracing the evolution of the Labour Party’s foreign policy throughout the 20th century to the present date. This is the first comprehensive study of the history of the Labour Party’s worldview and foreign policy. It argues that Labour’s foreign policy perspective should be seen not as the development of a socialist foreign policy, but as an application of the ideas of liberal internationalism. Volume Two provides a critical analysis of Labour’s foreign policy since 1951. It examines Labour’s attempts to rethink foreign policy, focusing on intra-party debates, the problems that Labour faced when in power, and the conflicting pressures from party demands and external pressures. It examines attitudes to rearmament in the 1950s, the party’s response to the Suez crisis and the Vietnam War, the bitter divisions over nuclear disarmament and the radicalisation of foreign and defence policy in the 1980s. It also examines Labour’s desire to provide moral leadership to the rest of the world. The last two chapters focus on the Blair and Brown years, with Blair’s response to the Kosovo crisis, to 9/11 and his role in the ‘war on terror’. Whereas Blair’s approach to foreign affairs was to place emphasis on the efficacy of the use of military force, Brown’s approach instead placed faith in the use of economic measures. This highly readable book provides an excellent analysis of Labour’s foreign policy. It is essential reading for students of British politics, the Labour Party, and foreign policy.

A majestic narrative reckoning with the forces that have shaped the nature and destiny of the world’s governing institutions The story of global cooperation is a tale of dreamers goading us to find common cause in remedying humanity’s worst problems. But international institutions are also tools for the powers that be to advance their own interests. Mark Mazower’s Governing the World tells the epic, two-hundred-year story of that inevitable tension—the unstable and often surprising alchemy between ideas and power. From the rubble of the Napoleonic empire in the nineteenth century through the birth of the League of Nations and the United Nations in the twentieth century to the dominance of global finance at the turn of the millennium, Mazower masterfully explores the current era of international life as Western dominance wanes and a new global balance of powers emerges.

Based on new source material available in both England and India, India's Partition examines the partition in the context of the retreat of the British Empire. The freeing of India from British rule was the result of internal forces in both countries, while the split of the subcontinent along religious lines served as a harbinger for things to come. Panigrahi argues that partition was not a foregone conclusion and was not the favoured option for most of the main parties, but rather was the result of a unique set of circumstances. An erudite exploration of the highly complex relations between India and Britain leading up to independence and the split, India's Partition looks at the leaders who made far-reaching decisions - and their motivations - during this critical time.

Throughout the nineteenth century the British Empire was the subject of much writing; floods of articles, books and government reports were produced about the areas under British control and the policy of imperialism. Mid-Victorian Imperialists investigates how the Victorians made sense of all the information regarding the empire by examining the writings of a collection of gentlemen who were amongst the first people to join the Colonial Society in 1868-69. These men included imperial officials, leading settlers, British politicians and writers, and Beasley looks at the common trends in their beliefs about the British Empire and how their thoughts changed during their lives to show how Mid-Victorian theories of racial, cultural and political classification arose.

This volume examines the development of the idea of 'technocratic internationalism': the promotion of the involvement of experts in the workings of international relations, especially in international organizations such as the United Nations and European Union.