A Renewed Social Democracy for an ‘Age of Internationalism’: An Interpretivist Account of New Labour's Foreign Policy

Abstract

This article employs an interpretive approach to explore New Labour's use of social scientific theories in developing its foreign policy. After situating New Labour in the broad tradition of social democracy, it outlines the beliefs that most social democrats shared about the values of internationalism, international community and moral leadership. Taking these concepts in turn, the article then considers how New Labour modified their content in response to issues raised by ‘New Times’. In so doing, it problematizes New Labour's responses by revealing that they drew on ideas taken from complex interdependence theory, communitarianism and democratic peace theory respectively. The article then examines how these theories, in conjunction with the reformulation of its foreign policy, influenced New Labour's transformation of the three values, before concluding with a brief examination of the dilemmas arising from this process.