This past week has seen two important foreign policy statements that define what we should now expect from a New Labour Government. The first was a general set-piece at the Mansion House by the Prime Minister and the other was Foreign Secretary Miliband's assertion of the United Kingdom's role in Europe in Bruges on 15 November.

Much has been made of claims that the Prime Minister red-lined much of the strongly pro-European content in Miliband's first draft but this should not be taken at face value. Gordon Brown likes to present himself as more euro-sceptic than his predecessor but this is largely on economic matters and in defence of the UK's role as global service provider. 

It is probable that Miliband is more europhile than the Prime Minister but, if it was useful to make him appear to have been disciplined by his boss, this was for domestic and US consumption. 

Sensation-seeking media love personal squabbles and courtly politics. There is an underlying assumption that Miliband is Blairite pretender for Brown's crown one day. This always gets the commentariat going - indeed, makes them wonderfully manipulable.

British foreign policy is conducted within the bounds of faux-debate about the balance of interest between the Atlantic and Europe. In fact, the two 'sides' are far more united than they are divided - just as Blair and Brown were always broadly united on the New Labour vision for Party and country despite acres of print on their camps' alleged mutual personal hatred.

Gordon Brown Sets the Scene ...

Gordon Brown’s Mansion House Speech was important but it contained no surprises. It is best seen as the British State's self-confident and relaxed attempt to tell the world that the period of penance for Blair's methodological blunders is now over. The country can now return to business as usual. 

Above all, this was a pitch for continued junior leadership of the Atlantic alliance when Bush moves on (and, no, Sarkozy's challenge to that leadership position is not taken seriously in London). Brown positioned London as an ally of the US over Iran although our suspicion remains that this positioning is cover for a conservative Sunni-Anglo-Saxon alliance to pre-empt the White House from doing anything truly stupid. 

The widespread assumption now is that there is no serious intention of a military strike by either the US or Israel against Tehran but there is a lingering fear that an attack of the vapours in the dying days of the regime might impel an executive order that even Admiral Fallon cannot resist. At this time, it becomes essential for the UK to indicate undying love for a sensible America.

But British policy is not centred on Iran - Iran is simply the hard edge of a more general crisis in Western hegemony. Policymakers have sat down together and agreed that Great Britain must have a cogent and consistent position within a unified West more generally, regardless of lingering resentments about the recent conduct of the current US Government. The British Establishment has let off steam over the summer and now is bowing to the inevitable.

The new game is the old game with some minor changes to improve spectator enjoyment. A united West must (so the British establishment now agrees) assert its interests (with suitable ethical cover) under continued but multilateral US leadership. Many in the UK may feel a little sour at the touch of poodle-dom in the policy. Brown’s tough talk about national sovereignty will probably cover over the cracks if only because (outside the pro-European Liberal Democrats and the powerless Left) there is no establishment interest in a breach with the US.

The media attacks on Lord Malloch-Brown in the run-up to the Mansion House Speech indicate that anti-Americanism is now seen as an embarrassment. Malloch-Brown has disappointed not because he is not intelligent and capable but because he is too intelligent and capable. He has a cogent and credible alternative and liberal vision of foreign policy that briefly looked as if it might displace Blairismo. This is not the place to talk of the noble Lord. He is there to speak on Africa and his pronouncements on the Middle East, though wise, are unwanted.

Alhough the tone appeared different from the rhetoric of 1997-2007, the actual substance of Brown's speech indicated that he had not moved very far at all from Blair’s position. We have to remember that Atlanticism has been locked into the Labour Right since the days of Ernie Bevin and that Gordon Brown comes from precisely that tradition. It survived the Leftist onslaught in the 1970s and 1980s, reinvented itself and fixed the rules for democracy inside the Party to its own benefit - it did not do all this to wobble on policy in power.

There was never any realistic prospect of a change in direction once Brown had managed to create sufficient rhetorical distance from his predecessor. This ‘business as usual’ seeks a return to conditions before the Bush Administration, which the British increasingly like to think of as anomalous or as a ‘blip' in the otherwise smooth running of that special relationship where educated Greeks counsel imperious Romans.

This may be wishful thinking because the legacies of 9/11 and the consequent war on terror make conditions post-Bush very different from before. The British people will probably roll in with this general atlanticist approach. They may equally fall into their old habits of patronizing the third world and the French and standing up to Ivan, but the UK has neither the resources nor the will to engage in the levels of military action favoured by the previous Prime Minister.

Miliband's Europeanism

A few days after the Mansion House Speech, Foreign Secretary Miliband followed the now standard strategy of balancing pro-American sentiment by unruffling any remaining ruffled feathers amongst pro-Europeans. He asserted the role of the EU as a ‘model power’ in which the UK must be engaged as sovereign state. Of course, this will now ruffle eurosceptic feathers but it seems that the Government has lost its fear of The Sun.

One particular aspiration of Miliband's was that this new 'power' can project both hard and soft power as a more amenable alternative to the US in sensitive parts of the world. He meant North Africa and the Middle East. Will European soft imperialism, with beads for the natives, be more amenable than sending an American gunboat? We leave you to decide.

The British strategy – again, plus ca change - is to rebuild its role as pivot between the US and Europe within a united liberal West. This, of course, contains an implicit assumption that there is a boundaried and united liberal West. It is a return to the sort of reified thinking about blocs that emerged in the 1930s and sustained propaganda operations throughout the Cold War. For British liberals, East Coast Atlanticism and European liberal aspirations are necessarily brokered through London. There is some truth in this but the policy faces at least three major challenges.

First, American national interest thinking has not gone away with the emergence of problems in the conduct of the 'war on terror'. It has been transformed from the PNAC model that dominated Republican strategy until recently to a post-9/11 Democratic version that also equates the extension of liberal values with American Manifest Destiny. For some time to come, the US will be pulling Europe into various forms of liberal interventionism that will be indistinguishable to its opponents from neo-imperialism.

Second, Europeans may be more inclined than most British to see the EU as a proto-state but some see it quite definitely as a third force against the US as much as a partnership with Washington. National rivalries and imperial assumptions remain barely concealed under the surface of Europe, especially when it comes to overseas contracts and trade influence. 

Finally, the model of the united liberal West may be very pleasing to Western progressives in opposing both the Bush Administration’s aggressiveness and local nationalisms. However, it will still remain offensive to non-Western nationalisms. It is, by definition, set to increase tension between blocs – an assertive liberal Western bloc almost demands the calling into existence of a countervailing ‘bloc of resistance’ that will define itself as essentially defensive. Russian responses will be typical.

Milibandian Progressivism

Miliband is a euro-enthusiast. He is a ‘grand narrative’ politician (trained in a Marxist mentality that he has since claimed to have abandoned). His ideology contains an in-built progressive assumption that order can be constructed out of chaos, that good can come out of bad and that the West is more advanced and benign than anything outside it. All Miliband has to do (so he thinks) is give a bit of nudge to the inevitability of history. He is an ‘Augustinian’, a believer in a secular providence, a Roman amongst barbarians.

To be a supporter of New Labour’s foreign policy within the UK, one must have the mentality of a Roman and a Christian. To oppose it is to be implicitly a barbarian and paganus, a Pelagian or Caractacus. In a country increasingly of migrants and of an elite favourable to migrants, Miliband could be forgiven for believing that providence was with him.

His polar opposite is not the Tory Party but the racist nationalism of the BNP. Implicitly setting itself against this model, Miliband and other progressives hope to revive the idea that American and European intellectual legionaries may legitimately employed to extend the boundaries of an empire of ideas, largely defined by free markets, global energy security, environmental responsibility, humanitarian imperatives, developmentalism and the extension of democracy and human rights.

From this point of view, the issue with the Bush Administration is not that its ultimate aims were wrong but that its methods were ill-thought out without ‘Greek’ guidance. This underpins Miliband’s provocative assertion that Brown (in a statement surely approved of by the Prime Minister) would have invaded Iraq just as Blair had done.

The aggressive onslaught on Lord Malloch-Brown, whose model of the world is far less based on a triumphalist West (in which Israel plays its own peculiar role as 'beacon') and is far more based on a notion of global governance in which the ‘rest’ have their say, also indicates a sympathy with US Administration aims more than its method.

But Malloch-Brown is not into ‘grand narratives’ or a transmuted Marxism - or Manifest Destiny. He seems to give more credence to the exercise of will rather than riding the tiger of history. Perhaps he does not know it yet but he is on borrowed time if he continues to defy his Foreign Secretary's overall vision.

The New Model Europe

The detail of Miliband’s Bruges Speech (a location itself carefully chosen because of its association with the founding of contemporary British euro-scepticism) gives us a flavour of what EU power means within Western ‘neo-imperialism’. The size of the European market, the ability to set global standards, the joint negotiating clout of 27 members and the ‘pull’ of membership and association - these are presented as the drivers for the assertion of a superiority of values.  Power in this model, does not follow the barrel of a gun but the fountain pen of the lawyer.

We can see immediately why the British and French are at loggerheads over Turkish inclusion in the EU. These are two conflicting visions of Western values - one imperial, one republicain. The French quite rightly see Muslim members being incorporated into the New Rome as changing the character of Rome. The French are playing the role of ancient Republican Romans resisting the granting of citizenship to the integrated pagani of Provinces like Gaul and Syria in case Rome itself loses its ‘republican virtue’. This is, truly, a life or death struggle for French culture.

Miliband’s concentration on the free market operating within growing boundaries under the rule of law (again, the similarity with Imperial Rome is startling) is a clue to another aspect of the case. The EU (brokered by those trained in global standard setting in London but adapted to EU customs) will create standards in all areas of economic, social and political life. 

Because they are unified across the EU and made consonant with American standards, these regulations for market and society will be models for anyone wishing to be part of the Western economic miracle. You can see the flaw in the vision - the mass of Anglo-Saxons will be Europeanised and the mass of Europeans liberalised by the same elite using a political power based on law and security rather than dictatorship - or democracy. The strain on trust in democracy in its heartlands could be immense over time.

Will these ‘global’ (aka Western) standards be a precursor to world empire, in which anything outside the liberal culture of the unified West is to be regarded as ‘barbarian’? Well, the Middle Kingdom of China has its own sense of what is 'barbarian' so we may be on the rocky road to visionary confrontation.

In a sense, Miliband is merely offering a considered European response to a longstanding American approach to asserting extraterritoriality and hegemony. The US has a history of extending federal power through the interstate commerce clause and the national security interest that was crossing the national boundary into extraterritoriality as early as the 1920s (drugs trade regulation). 

These processes have always tended to advantage indigenous American commercial interests and this momentum has not diminished since.  Faced with the extension of the FBI's remit into the wider world, Treasury's role in enforcing sanctions and one-sided extradition treaties, the European Atlanticist response is now not to assert national sovereignty as a European 'superpower' (which it never much liked) but to seek joint rights with the US in administering the West and so the rest of the world.

Angela Merkel of Germany has long shared this aspiration to merge ‘Atlantic’ systems with Anglo-Saxon ‘progressives’ but her domestic political base is weak. A certain Anglo-German understanding now allows the UK to take the lead alongside the East Coast elite in the US.

Concluding Remarks

From this perspective, we can see that British foreign policy under New Labour is strongly ideological.  It shows considerable continuity from the approach – Atlanticist, pro-EU, liberal-progressive, security-minded, anti-socialist and anti-nationalist – that New Labour derived from its Cold War Labour Right origins. It has few challengers in the UK left within the political class – any resistance is inchoate and lies only in the instinct of a few in an apathetic or powerless population.

Let us look at the oposition. The fascists are no-hopers - they are not associated as they would like to be with Arthur and Stonehenge but with jackbooted thugs and the worst sort of a-social inadequacy. The traditional Left in the UK (unlike in Germany today) was wiped out with the ending of the Cold War, implicitly associated with a failed and brutal experiment.

The Conservatives, the natural opponent of New Labour, have seen their Churchillian clothes stolen from them and are left with an Atlanticist model that no longer fits thinking in Washington except in the further reaches of the Republican Right. The circle around Gove and Fox are typical - out of place and out of time.

The Liberal Democrats have an anti-American Europeanism that might win them votes in Europe but stalls them as a minority party within eurosceptic England, while their fire is stolen in the Celtic fringes by Europeanist petty nationalists. One million people in the streets against the Government intervention in Iraq and their best response has been Menzies Campbell.

This leaves an interesting conundrum. The British Government is pursuing a foreign policy (no longer by stealth but directly and assertively) that is almost certainly in defiance of the instincts of much of its own electorate - and yet the electorate have no means of changing the policy except through the election of a Tory Government whose own policies are (to be charitable) incoherent, wobbling between a variety of internal competing analyses of the national interest.

If you ask what is the Tory policy on the national interest, you get talking tough on security and opposition to an extension of the 28 days, you get the circle of High Tory Arabists and you get the neo-con element, you get Hague on Europe and you get Cameron in Europe. There is, in fact, no alternative Tory vision that does not involve making a series of footnotes on New Labour policy.

Those in the Electorate who are interested in these matters have almost certainly accepted that a Tory Government would operate scarcely much differently from New Labour – only without the coherent vision.

Our own opinion is that the UK is sleepwalking into a crisis based on an exaggerated sense of its own ability to deploy its resources. What we can say is that, eventually, European hard power claims are going to have to require the diversion of budgets from domestic concerns to military hardware.

To be fair to the French, they seem prepared to grasp this nettle but the British want power on the cheap. Soft power backed by peacekeepers while the Americans do the grunt work is going to be less expensive and more easy to sell to the electorate than the diversion of tax resources into an independent European defence capability.

This is the essential ‘internal contradiction’ of a progressive Europe, one in which the patriotic preconditions for shifting taxes from private economic interests and social welfare to providing the tools for legionaries in the field does not yet exist. Be wary of the calculated creation of enemies just to justify increased expenditures in the West. Those enemies may decide to become what they have been asked to become and then we really will have a problem.

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