The Labour Party and the Politics of War and Peace 1900–1924 – By Paul Bridgen

The Labour Party and the Politics of War and Peace 1900–1924 . By Paul Bridgen . The Royal Historical Society. Boydell . 2009 . xii + 223 pp. £50.00/$95.00 . The foreign policy of the Labour Party from 1900 to 1924 forms a small part of current historiographical debates on Labour Party history. Many historians have examined the party's ‘thinking about peace and war’ (p. 5) and have assumed that it was driven by an ‘unsophisticated “idealistic” approach’ influenced greatly by the Liberal and radical ideas of the nineteenth century plus the policies developed by the Union of Democratic Control (UDC). Bridgen rightly points out that this prevailing interpretation has not been shaped by any examination of the Labour Party records and has attempted to rectify this omission. In its place, he presents contrary evidence that the Labour Party developed a quite sophisticated approach to foreign policy, essentially in connection with the maintenance of peace in Europe, based upon discussions within the wider Labour movement and alongside the international socialist movement. Indeed, Bridgen argues that one of the formative influences upon this was Gladstonian internationalism, which favoured nations uniting together to prevent war rather than the anti-war Cobdenite radicalism of the UDC, which rather assumed that free trade and a more democratic approach to domestic policies would be enough to avoid war. He presents his argument convincingly in what is an impressive piece of research. Bridgen argues that despite the influence during the Great War of the UDC – formed by E. D. Morel, Norman Angell, C. P. Trevelyan, Arthur Ponsonby and James Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's first prime minister – there really was no clearly defined Labour Party approach to foreign policy until the formulation of the 1917 Memorandum on War Aims. After that, Arthur Henderson, greatly influenced by his visit to Russia, seems to have steered a course towards support for the formation of a League of Nations to settle potential conflict in Europe, a position which Ramsay MacDonald gradually moved towards despite his scepticism of the influence of collective international action. Indeed, MacDonald and the Labour Party increasingly felt that collective international action might preserve the peace which the continuance of the reparations settlements of the Treaty of Versailles threatened. What is distinctive in this study is the extent to which Bridgen has marshalled the evidence even though his main theme, that the UDC's policies did not dominate the Labour Party and Labour government policies of the 1920s, is less original than he supposes. After all, it is well documented that MacDonald denied Morel the post of foreign secretary in the first Labour government of 1924 and that he decided to run the post jointly with that of prime minister. It is equally well known that Ponsonby was alarmed at this decision and that, as deputy to MacDonald as foreign secretary, he soon became disillusioned with the first Labour government's foreign policy. Nevertheless, Bridgen provides strong supportive evidence for his views and presents them with impeccable clarity and detail. It is a book to be strongly recommended to those interested in both British foreign policy and Labour Party history

Communism · Democracy · Economics · Historiography · Internationalism (politics · Interpretation (philosophy · Political economy · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Realigning election · Socialism · Sociology · Trade union · Trotskyism · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Philosophy · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact