New Labour and the European Union

Abstract

How should New Labour’s policy towards the European Union be assessed? Because the criteria we employ to evaluate this record will affect the conclusions we reach, it is important that an explicit discussion of these benchmarks is provided. One popular approach in the more general literature on the Labour Party is to judge its achievements against a broader statement of its principles, ideals or values. When it comes to New Labour, academics have sought to gauge its actions in terms of its ability to forge a ‘third way’ or moderate social-democratic programme. Applied to the sphere of foreign affairs, we would expect such a policy to start from the position that globalization has radically altered the nature of state sovereignty in the twenty-first century. Consequently, any moderate social-democratic diplomacy should work with the grain of this structural context, while simultaneously trying to develop initiatives designed to ameliorate the adverse consequences of interdependence. We might add that a ‘Third Way’ foreign policy represents a repudiation of crude realpolitik and a commitment to internationalism as a way of addressing some of the problems traditionally resolved at the nation state level (Giddens, 2006, 2007; Deighton, 2001; Vickers, 2000; see also Williams, 2005: 15–31).