Conclusion

Abstract

This collection was put together for two reasons. First, at the empirical level, it set out to test the validity of a proposition about British foreign policy that has been frequently heard in the period since 1997: that the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown promised a radical break from the past but ultimately produced little in the way of novel thinking or practice in the conduct of Britain’s external relations. Stimulated by a discovery of overlapping findings in the editors’ respective research into foreign policy ethics and Britain’s relations with the EU under New Labour, we wanted to branch out to include other realms of foreign policy action under Blair and Brown in order to produce a more holistic account of the continuities and ruptures with previous practices. Second, at the theoretical level, we wanted to spur the study of British foreign policy in new directions by incorporating the classic Churchill ‘three circles’ model of British foreign policy in a conceptually inclined approach to appreciating the complexities of the material and ideational frameworks within which British foreign policy is necessarily constructed and executed. Our ‘Identity-Ethics-Power’ (IEP) model moves away from seeing British foreign policy as the sum of its geostrategic relationships at any point in time. Instead, we propose that policy-makers would do well to take seriously the ideational underpinnings of foreign policy, paying attention to: the kind of Britain they want to create and want to see being created on the world stage; the sets of values they want to promote at home and export abroad to secure particular elements of both the national interest and those of the international community as a whole; and, finally, the levers of power (at home and abroad) that they can best pull to help achieve these objectives.