Blair’s Liberal Interventionism

Abstract

Right up to the close of his premiership Tony Blair insisted that he was a liberal interventionist in foreign policy and that this commitment had guided the various military actions which he had ordered as Prime Minister or which he had coordinated with others either in NATO, the UN or the `coalition of the willing' in relation to Iraq. Given that the Iraq invasion overshadowed virtually everything about his government in the latter period of his time in office and that the invasion of Iraq and its consequences almost certainly foreshortened his time in office, and given that his historical reputation is, to say the least, going to be highly coloured if not dominated by Iraq, it is important both to understand the moral and political case for liberal interventionism and to see how well it fits into Blair's `Third Way' approach to politics. There is no doubt that Blair took the elaboration of the case for liberal interventionism very seriously and he made substantial speeches on the theme, including the definitive speech in Chicago on `The Doctrine of the International Community' (Stelzer, 2004). However, it is equally clear that these speeches fall a long way short of a convincing normative case for the position on which his foreign policy rested. Therefore my aim in this chapter will be to set out as strongly as I can the case for liberal interventionism --- as it is found in the literature of political theory and international relations as well as by Blair and Jonathan Powell (his former Chief of Staff) who has also written about these matters (Powell, 2007) --- to address the critical response that there has been to that case and to see how both the positive case and its critique fit into Tony Blair's own account of the position that he espoused and how far criticism of liberal interventionism applies to his version of it.