What does a left-wing foreign policy look like?
| Date | 22 March 2019 |
| Author | Morris, George |
Michael Walzer, A Foreign Policy for the Left, Yale University Press, New Haven 2018
Jeremy Corbyn is an unusual sort of politician in many ways, but not least in the fact that his main interests during his long parliamentary career have largely been in areas of foreign policy. As a result, in the seemingly constant conflict between factions of the Labour Party, where one stands on certain questions of foreign policy has become a marker of support for or opposition to the Corbyn leadership. His supporters consider him a stalwart opponent of imperialism, while his opponents say that he is a woolly-minded pacifist, or a terrorist-sympathising menace--some manage to apply both descriptions to the same man. The differences between Corbynism and Blairism, apparently the two poles of contemporary Labour politics, are not limited to foreign policy, but it is in foreign policy that the distinctions are most stark. Foreign policy has become, in a sense, a very domestic affair.
Though the current political juncture has brought these divisions once again to the fore, Labour's broad church has long been at its broadest here. On one side of the divide is what might be called the Atlanticist wing, proud of the Attlee government's role in the post-war creation of NATO, and more or less supportive of Tony Blair's 'liberal interventionism' from Kosovo to Iraq. On the other is the Labour left, critical of America and NATO, supportive of unilateral nuclear disarmament, and usually engaged with Palestine solidarity causes. In this, they have often become involved with the broader left through the range of organisations that exist outside, but on the peripheries of, the party--the SWP-dominated Stop the...
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