Still ‘leading from the edge’? New labour and the European union

Abstract

New Labour’s time in office coincided with a period of considerable activity within the European Union (EU). Four major Treaties were agreed (three ratified), an enlargement of unprecedented scale was managed, a European Security and Defence Policy was agreed upon, the single currency was launched and, towards the end of the New Labour government, the EU was struck by an unprecedented financial, economic and political crisis. This chapter analyses how the particular tensions between Britain and the EU have been navigated and articulated by the New Labour leadership. These tensions have already been comprehensively outlined, especially in Hugo Young’s masterful history of Britain and the EU (Young 1998), but the time is ripe for an account of the New Labour period in its totality. The primary aim here is to consider the extent to which the New Labour government offered a different approach to Europe from its Conservative predecessor by outlining the defining characteristics of that approach. Sir Stephen Wall states in the forward to this book that New Labour’s European policy represented ‘an almost perfect case study of continuity in British foreign policy’. It is difficult to argue that there was not substantial commonality in regard to the positions taken on key policy issues. New Labour continued to support a more liberal EU economic system and also sought to constrain the supranational dimension of Europe.