Rethinking a Socialist Foreign Policy: The British Labour Party and International Relations Experts, 1918 to 1931

Lucian M. Ashworth

International Labor and Working-Class History, 2009, vol. 75, issue 1, 30-48

Abstract: Between 1918 and 1929 the British Labour Party, working in conjunction with many of the top names in International Relations (IR), developed a coherent foreign policy centered around reforming the international system. This was a major policy change for a political party that, up until then, had concentrated on domestic social and political issues. The construction of Labour's interwar foreign policy was part of a wider intellectual revolution that produced the separate discipline of IR after the First World War, and the splits in Labour over foreign policy mirrored similar splits in the wider IR literature. Particularly important here were the differences of opinion over the relationship between arbitration, sanctions, and disarmament in a system of League of Nations pooled security. Labour's close association with IR experts and intellectuals resulted in the construction of an international policy that, while addressing socialist themes, drew on an older liberal tradition. The ultimate goal of this policy was to create pacific international conditions favorable to the development of democratic socialism. While events after 1931 forced a major rethinking in the Party, Labour's IR experts continued to provide policy-relevant advice that shaped the Party's responses to the rise of fascism.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:ilawch:v:75:y:2009:i:01:p:30-48_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Labor and Working-Class History from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().