Embracing Humanitarian Intervention: Atlanticism and the UK Interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo

Abstract

This article employs the interpretive approach to show that Britain's embrace of humanitarian intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was less a result of the election of New Labour or the psychology of Tony Blair, as conventional wisdom suggests, and more a consequence of a change in belief among policy-makers in the UK and beyond regarding the use of force for humanitarian ends, which originated prior to 1997 in American intervention in Bosnia in the summer of 1995. The effects of the moralism of the new government and its leader must therefore be viewed within a wider transatlantic context and against the background of the continued importance of the ‘Atlanticist’ tradition in UK foreign policy, with important implications for the study of UK foreign policy beyond the Balkans.