From ‘Ethical Foreign Policy’ to National Security Strategy: Exporting Domestic Incoherence

Abstract

Foreign policy under New Labour took many twists and turns. In its first year in office the New Labour team launched a supposedly new kind of foreign policy agenda, one with an ‘ethical dimension’, in which then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook promised that Britain would be a ‘force for good’ in the world (for an overview see Little and Wickham-Jones 2000). Two years on, Prime Minister Tony Blair proclaimed that NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo was a demonstration of a war for values rather than narrow national interests (Blair 1999a). However, in the early 2000s we witnessed an apparent return to a more traditional, Realist foreign policy dynamic in which national interests and hard security concerns seemed to reassert themselves in Afghanistan, Iraq and the so-called ‘war on terror’. The apparent return to a security and interest-based foreign policy agenda continued into the later years of the New Labour government, culminating in the development of an official National Security Strategy. In 2008 New Labour published Britain’s first codified national security strategy document, The National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom: Security in an Interdependent World (Cabinet Office 2008a), releasing subsequent updates and related documents, for example the National Risk Register (NRR) (Cabinet Office 2008b), The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism (Home Office 2009) and the National Security Update 2009 (NSSa) (Cabinet Office 2009).