Identity and New labour’s strategic foreign policy thinking

Abstract

One of the major innovations of New Labour’s foreign policy-making was its attempt to strategize policy in public documents. Whilst the previous administration did produce Annual Departmental Reports for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and make references to foreign policy strategies in speeches, it did not reflect on the purpose and goals of this activity in a self-conscious fashion. Indeed, one prominent pair of commentators suggests that: ‘In the preceding fifty years, there had been no public articulation of a conceptual framework for understanding the means and ends of foreign policy’ (Wheeler and Dunne 1998: 847). Within two weeks of taking office, New Labour had produced a mission statement for the FCO that set out Britain’s main policy priorities and linked these with the values of the UK at the end of the twentieth century (Cook 1997a). In 1998, there followed the Strategic Defence Review, a consultative exercise designed to restructure Britain’s armed forces for the challenges it would face in the next century (MoD 1998). Importantly, this would be ‘foreign-policy led’ and so also entailed a substantial degree of discussion around Britain’s foreign policy aims. Subsequently, a series of documents were produced on defence, international development, and foreign policy that sought to strategize the UK’s external relations (e.g. FCO 2006; MoD 2001a; DfID 2006).