Abstract
Little mention has been made so far about the politicians who deal with Britain’s external relations. This is partly because a study of the nature of British external policy-making in the 1990s is necessarily concerned with the underlying determinants of policy and will therefore tend to concentrate on the institutions, the structural factors, and on general trends within the world of officialdom. Moreover, many analysts, not to mention many officials, consider that the politicians who preside over external affairs simply make very little difference to policy. Most of the existing literature on British foreign policy-making makes only passing mention of the role of different politicians and parties on the policy-making process. Personalities and political parties matter, of course, and may have critical effects on particular issues. When leaders change, at the very least, a new set of personality characteristics comes into the reckoning. But most previous accounts of British foreign policy-making have found little that could usefully be said about the effects of different political leaders and of changes of government on the nature and conduct of the external policy process.
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Notes
See, William Wallace, The Foreign Policy Process in Britain (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1975), p. 93.
James Barber, Who Makes British Foreign Policy?, (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1976), pp. 78–9, 87.
David Vital, The Making of British Foreign Policy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968), p.76.
Joseph Frankel, British Foreign Policy 1945–1973 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p.32
Anthony Seldon, Churchill’s Indian Summer: The Conservative Government 1951–55 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981), pp. 409–15.
Frankel, op. cit., p. 35: Vital, op. cit., p. 74–5; see also, Karl Kaiser and Roger Morgan, Britain and West Germany: Changing Societies and the Future of Foreign Policy (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
Andrew Gamble, Britain in Decline, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 105–112.
Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher, revised ed. (London: Pan Books, 1990), p. 120.
Martin Holmes, Thatcherism: Scope and Limits 1983–87 (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 71.
See Michael Clarke, ‘British Perspectives on the Soviet Union’, in Alex Pravda and Peter Duncan, (eds), Soviet-British Relations Since the 1970s (Cambridge: Royal Institute of International Affairs/Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 68–91.
Quoted in Peter Jones, ‘British Defence Policy: The Breakdown of Inter-Party Consensus’, in Review of International Studies, 13(2) (1987), p. 117. Conservative Party views on these issues were well summarised by Mrs Thatcher on a number of occasions in Parliamentary Debates: 1986–87, House of Commons, 2 April, cols. 1223–4, 1227–9; 12 November, col. 23.
Christopher Coker, British Defence Policy in the 1990s: A Guide to the Defence Debate (London: Brassey’s, 1987), p. 125.
Jones, op. cit., p. 113. The development of Labour Party thinking on nuclear issues can be gleaned from, Mike Gapes, No Cruise, No Trident, No Nuclear Weapons (Labour Party, 1981); Labour Party, Defence and Security For Britain, National Executive Committee Statement to the Annual Conference, 1984; Labour Party, Britain Will Win: Labour Manifesto 1987; ‘Defence and Arms Control at the 1986 Party Conferences’, ADIU Report 8(6), (1986), p. 14. The position of the Liberal/SDP Alliance is best summarised in Britain United: The Time Has Come. The SDP/Liberal Alliance Programme for Government, (SDP/Liberal Alliance 1987), p.21, though the nature of the dissent within it is well-captured in Brian May, Is Russia Really a Threat?, Liberal Challenge Booklet, 7 (Liberal Party, 1986); Brian May, ‘Why the Red Card is Never a Trump’, The Guardian, 22 September 1986. See also the reports of internal alliance arguments on defence in The Financial Times, 26 September 1986; The Times, 25 September 1986, and an interview with David Owen in The Times, 13 September 1986.
See Michael Clarke, ‘The Debate on European Security in the United Kingdom’, in Ole Waever, et al. (eds), European Polyphony: Perspectives Beyond East-West Confrontation (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 121–40.
Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1964–70: A Personal Record (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), pp. 179–81.
Harold Wilson, Final Term: The Labour Government 1974–1976 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979), p. 58.
Ritchie Ovendale, ‘The South African Policy of the British Labour Government, 1947–51’, International Affairs, 59(1) (1982–83), pp. 41–58.
James Barber, ‘Southern Africa’, in Peter Byrd, (ed), British Foreign Policy Under Thatcher (Oxford: Philip Allen, 1988), p. 102.
On the moderate reality of international sanctions, see, Martin Holland, ‘The European Community and South Africa: In Search of a Policy for the 1990s’, International Affairs, 64(3), (1988), pp. 415–30.
Dennis Austin, ‘A South African Policy: Six Precepts in Search of a Diplomacy?’, International Affairs, 62(3) (1986), p. 396.
Lawrence Freedman and Virginia Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War (London: Faber & Faber, 1990).
Lawrence Freedman, ‘The Case of Westland and the Bias to Europe’, International Affairs, 63(1) (1986–87), pp. 1–20.
Norman Barry, ‘Ideology’, in Patrick Dunleavy, Andrew Gamble, and Gillian Peele, (eds), Developments in British Politics 3, (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 20–30.
M. Cassell, ‘Labour Leader Sees Dawning of a Free Europe’, The Financial Times 9 February 1990, p. 10.
Speech by Brian Sedgemore, The Independent, 16 June 1990, p.4. On Labour’s conversion to Europe see also, ‘Tale of Two Parties’, The Economist, 23 June 1990, p.36.
See Dennis Kavanagh, Thatcherism and British Politics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 108–9.
Peter Riddell, The Thatcher Government (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 206–28.
See also the later analysis of Peter Riddell, The Thatcher Decade (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
Hugo Young and Anne Sloman, The Thatcher Phenomenon, (London: BBC Publications, 1986), p. 117.
On the beginnings of this relationship see, Curtis Keeble, Britain and the Soviet Union 1917–89 (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 297–300.
By Nicholas Wapshott in his piece ‘Thatcher’s Messianic Message’ for The Observer, 24 September 1989, p. 13.
Joe Rogaly, ‘Head in Europe, Heart in the United States’, The Financial Times, 12 December 1989, p.18.
C. Pollitt, quoted in John Greenwood, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Whitehall Revolution: Public Administration or Public Management?’, Teaching Politics, 17(2) (1988), p. 210.
Peter Hennessy, ‘Testing Time for Reforms Project’, The Independent, 11 June 1990, p. 5.
See Frank Cooper, ‘Ministry of Defence’, in J. Gretton and Anthony Harrison, (eds), Reshaping Central Government, (Berkshire: Policy Journals, 1987), pp. 107–30.
Julian Critchley, Westminster Blues (London: Futura, 1986), p. 126.
Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989), p. 627.
David Howell, Blind Victory (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986).
John Campbell, ‘Defining “Thatcherism”’, Contemporary Record, 1(3) (1987), p.4.
For a useful review of the way in which the literature on Mrs Thatcher has tended to divorce the domestic from the foreign, see David Marquand, ‘The Literature on Thatcher’, Contemporary Record, 1(3), (1987, pp. 30–1.
By Neil Ascherson in the Independent on Sunday, 15 July 1990, p. 23.
James Cable, Political Institutions and Issues in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 88–90.
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© 1992 Royal Institute of International Affairs
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Clarke, M. (1992). The Politics of External Relations. In: British External Policy-making in the 1990s. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22122-6_7
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