Search

The 1997 New Labour government set about modernising British foreign policy by devising new ways of conceptualising, making and talking about Britain’s role in the world. First, in May 1997 Foreign Secretary Robin Cook famously announced that he wanted to give British foreign policy an ‘ethical dimension’. Second, in April 1999 the Prime Minister set out his ‘doctrine of the international community’ in which he spelt out the multifarious security challenges posed to individual nation states by global interdependence and the ‘circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts’. Finally, Chancellor Gordon Brown has returned time and again to the potential gains to be had from exploiting what he calls the ‘British genius’ on the world stage.New ways of representing foreign policy, together with a sophisticated communications strategy on the part of the government since 1997 demands new ways of researching British foreign policy. In this paper I consider two questions arising from this challenge: first of all, what can discourse analysis contribute to political research in general? Second, how can we design a workable research programme into New Labour’s European policy that has discourse analysis at its very centre? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether could write a history of British international thought. It begins by asking whether the idea of a history of British international thought is an intelligible one, and with the related question of whether there is a distinctively British tradition of thinking about international relations and if so how that tradition might be defined and explained. It examines debates over national traditions of political thought, the apparent anomaly of a national tradition of inter-national thought, and Churchill’s suggestion that there is a distinctive Anglo-American political tradition supporting a distinctive Anglo-American tradition in foreign affairs. It suggests that although limited themes or periodsâ€"such as Atlantic republicanism, Victorian international law, Edwardian liberalism, or a mid-twentieth century “English School”â€"might be suitable objects of historical inquiry, one must be skeptical of the idea of a national tradition extending from Bacon or Hobbes to Namier or Bull. In the course of this inquiry, the key terms in these debatesâ€"tradition, history, thought, and internationalâ€"are considered. The advantage of studying British international thought is to focus attention on neglected thinkers and themes, and on their context, but there may also be value in looking back at the international thought of a nation in (what might be) its moment of European or global dusk, which isâ€"as Hegel remarkedâ€"when the historian properly enters the scene. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the impact of Europe on the internal cohesion of the major British political parties, through its capacity to affect their issue profiles. It recounts the irruption of the European issue onto the agenda of British politics at various times in the recent history of the country, noting how this is reflected in the manifesto statements of the major parties. More particularly, it focuses on the impact of Europe on the attitudinal cohesion of the parties, making use of cluster analysis of survey data of parliamentarians in order to show how the parties - and especially the Conservatives - seem to have absorbed this issue and thus staved off the threat of internal fragmentation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the life of the current parliament the British government will again have to adress the issue of a replace for the strategic nuclear deterrent. The debate todate has been limited both in its volume and scope - it has tended to follow the traditional lines of rights and wrongs of possessing such a capability. This paper seeks to place the debate within the wider transformation debate within defence and consuider the impact that party politics will have the decision. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]