Labour and the Politics of Internationalism, 1906-1914

Abstract

Historians have traditionally characterized the early Labour party as an insular, ‘labourist’ organization out of sync with the mainstream of European socialism and indifferent to foreign affairs and internationalism. However, this perspective is deeply misguided, as Labour's ‘Big Four’—MacDonald, Snowden, Hardie and Glasier—used their positions of authority in the Labour Party, Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the British Section of the International to place foreign policy and socialist internationalism at the heart of their efforts to further the Labour alliance. This article explores two aspects of the ‘politics of internationalism’: first, the Labour leadership's use of socialist internationalism to legitimate the Labour alliance with trade unions in the face of criticism from the ILP left wing; second, the party's portrayal of itself as a more faithful exponent of a Gladstonian moral foreign policy than the Liberal government. Labour and the ILP were crucial allies in the revisionist and pragmatic wing of the Second International, and these ties allowed the ‘Big Four’ to portray the Labour coalition as in keeping with democratic socialist strategy in Europe. At the same time, historians should explore the possibility that Labour's parliamentary and public interventions on foreign affairs aimed to undermine Liberalism on its left flank by exploiting radical concerns over the Liberal government's foreign policy, particularly its dealings with Russia, to portray Labour as the defenders of the Gladstonian tradition in foreign affairs and, hence, as the only conscionable choice for progressives in the twentieth century.