The Labour Party first ran as an independent political party in the 1906 British general elections. Its short bullet-pointed manifesto famously contained only a half sentence on foreign policy: “Wars are fought to make the rich richer. … ”Footnote ¹ Even this brief mention made it clear that international policy was merely an appendage to domestic social and economic concerns. Before the First World War, Labour regarded itself as a party primarily concerned with the problems of domestic policy, a position confirmed by Labour's new leader, James Ramsay MacDonald, in his 1911 book on the state of socialism in Britain.Footnote ² The First World War was to change all this. In its 1918 constitution the Party committed itself to the establishment of a “Federation of Nations for the maintenance of freedom and peace, for the establishment of suitable machinery for the adjustment and settlement of international disputes…”Footnote ³ As part of this overhaul in 1918 the Party also established Advisory Committees that were designed to provide advice to the Party Executive and, later, to Labour MPs. The most prolific and successful of these was the Advisory Committee on International Questions (ACIntQ). From 1918 Labour forged a comprehensive foreign policy, and by 1929 it had developed a policy document, Labour and the Nation, which laid out a six-pillared plan for a socialist foreign policy.Footnote ⁴ During its minority administrations in 1924 and 1929–1931 Labour was in a position to introduce many of the policies that it had formulated since 1918. Ironically, although the Party prided itself on its expertise in domestic policy, the two interwar Labour governments had greater success in their international endeavours than in their social and economic policy.Footnote ⁵

Labour's development from a movement with little interest in international affairs into a party of government with a comprehensive foreign policy forged out of heated internal debates is one of the most dramatic policy changes in British party politics. This policy change has not been without its biographers. The most comprehensive of these is probably Henry R. Winkler, whose two books on the subject are a valuable resource for the study of Labour foreign policy.Footnote ⁶ Winkler's argument, that Labour's policy change was the result of the work of a minority of Party leaders and experts, plays up the agency of individuals. Rhiannon Vickers' analysis of the development of Labour international policy up to 1951 paints with a broader brush over a longer period and is more concerned with the underlying internationalism of the Party.Footnote ⁷ Earlier treatments of Labour's policy change have stressed particular ideological and partisan contributions. Catherine Ann Cline traces major changes in Labour's interwar policy to the influx of former Liberals and progressive Conservatives to Labour following the First World War.Footnote ⁸ Labour's foreign policy, therefore, is a direct descendent of the radical wing of the old Liberal Party. This position was also central to A. J. P. Taylor's portrayal of the Labour Party as the heir to the older Liberal dissenting tradition in British foreign policy.Footnote ⁹ By contrast, Michael R. Gordon presents Labour policy in the 1920s as socialist and, like Vickers, plays up the underlying unity of the Party's foreign policy doctrine until the arguments of the 1930s cut deep into fundamental principles.Footnote ¹⁰

The range of opinions on the form and nature of Labour's development of a foreign policy is an indication of the complexity of Labour's policy change. Certainly it was a small group of experts and members of the leadership who pushed the development of the new foreign policy, as Winkler argues, although the extent and depth of opposition to the new pro-League policy can often be overplayed by taking this view. Seeing the Party as fundamentally internationalist is accurate but can underplay the deep divisions over party policy and gloss over the hard work carried out by individuals in the Party. It is also certainly true that Labour was heavily influenced by its new recruits and that a socialist and trade union core maintained a sense of continuity within the movement as a whole. What all of these studies demonstrate, when taken together, is the underlying pluralism of the Party. Back in 1911 MacDonald had said that, unlike many of the continental European socialist and labor parties, British Labour was not a true socialist party, but rather “a union of socialist and trade-union bodies for immediate political work” particularly suited to “British conditions.”Footnote ¹¹ Labour's foreign policy in the early 1920s was a product of this pluralism. It drew deeply from earlier Liberal radicalism, stressed the link between domestic working-class hardship and the flawed structures of the international system, benefited from Labour's position in the Second International, and also responded to the recent revolutions in international affairs following the First World War. The resulting foreign policy addressed socialist themes, while drawing on a liberal tradition that favored the construction of international regimes that minimized global conflict and increased peaceful interactions between peoples.

What has not been touched on so much is the close link between the development of Labour's foreign policy and the creation of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline. The years 1918–1931 did not just see the development and execution of a new socialist foreign policy in Britain; it also witnessed the creation of an intellectual discipline of IR in Britain. Some of the new IR intellectuals, such as Alfred Zimmern or Philip Noel Baker,Footnote ¹² were, at one time or another, based in universities. Others, such as Norman Angell and Leonard Woolf, remained within journalism and literary circles. Many of the new IR intellectuals, including the four mentioned above, were directly involved in the construction of Labour's foreign policy after 1918. Thus, Labour's foreign policy was also part of a larger intellectual revolution that had seen the development of a separate science of IR. It was this intellectual input that helped to blend the socialist and liberal elements of Labour's approach to international affairs into a coherent foreign policy.

This article looks at how IR intellectuals and experts contributed to the development of Labour's major policy shift on international affairs. A high proportion of the intellectuals that worked with Labour were among the “new recruits” that joined the Party on or around 1918, with many being directly attracted by Labour's developing approach to international affairs. My argument is that in order to understand Labour's foreign policy, and in particular to grasp what a radical departure it was for both Labour as a party and for British foreign policy as a whole, we have to see it as part of a general shift in the way that the international sphere was being conceived. Labour's direct links to the academic world of IR meant that Party policy was particularly sensitive to the wider intellectual debates in IR. IR experts were not only advisors to the Party, but also actively involved in the leadership. Hugh Dalton, who rose to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1945 and was number two in the Foreign Office between 1929 and 1931, wrote on international affairs before the Second World War;Footnote ¹³ Philip Noel Baker, who rose to cabinet rank in the Second World War coalition government and remained active in Labour governments until 1977, was the foremost expert on the issue of disarmament in Britain in the interwar period.Footnote ¹⁴ Even senior leaders, such as James Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's prime minister in the two interwar minority governments, and Arthur Henderson, Labour's Foreign Minister from 1929–1931, produced a number of key pamphlets on international questions.Footnote ¹⁵

The major forum for the interaction between the academic world and the Party structure was the ACIntQ, a statutory body established as a source of advice for the Party on all matters germane to international affairs. Many of its members, such as Philip Noel Baker and Hugh Dalton, crossed the divide between intellectual IR and practical foreign policy. In addition to Noel Baker and Dalton, the members of the Committee included some of the most influential writers on international affairs of their generation. J. A. Hobson, David Mitrany, Leonard Woolf, Norman Angell, G. Lowes Dickinson, and H. N. Brailsford all wrote memoranda for the Committee. Some of these memoranda, after alterations in the Committee and passage through the Party Executive, became official Labour Party pamphlets. Memoranda from the ACIntQ were sent to both the National Executive and to the Parliamentary Labour Party, where they became the source for discussions on policy. Furthermore, many ACIntQ members were also active in drafting policy at other levels of the Party. Noel Baker and Woolf, for example, wrote the international sections of Labour and the Nation.

The rest of this article will assess the development of Labour foreign policy as a product of the intellectual debates in the emerging study of IR, putting Labour policy into the context of contemporary IR theory. The ACIntQ, as the critical locus for this interaction, will figure prominently, as will ACIntQ memoranda. The first section looks at the major debates within IR at the time and will link these to the key foreign policy splits in Labour. The second focuses on the interaction between arbitration, sanctions, and disarmament in interwar IR and looks at how this nexus was used to forge Labour's international policy. The third section evaluates the policy prescriptions of the IR experts and their influence on Labour policy and ends with an assessment of the socialist content of Labour's international policy.

Academic IR in its First Decade

Before examining the state of academic IR in the decade following the peace, it is important to point out that, unlike IR today, the subject was not primarily confined to the universities. A combination of factors, including the small size of the university sector in comparison with today, the sudden popularity of international affairs following the Great War, and the lack of clear boundaries between academic writing, journalism, and pamphleteering meant that those who were considered experts in IR were an eclectic bunch. Even the IR experts within the university system—Alfred Zimmern, G. Lowes Dickinson, Gilbert Murray, and, much later, E. H. Carr—were new to the field, coming mainly from classics and history. Most of the top writers in the field—Norman Angell, Leonard Woolf, J. A. Hobson, Helena Swanwick, and H. N. Brailsford—worked as journalists and independent writers. Others with university connections—Hugh Dalton and Philip Noel Baker—were full-time politicians by the mid-1920s. Only David Mitrany had a background in politics and sociology, and even his interest in the international sphere was a product of the war. At this stage, universities were not the natural home of political science scholarship in Britain.

Although the First World War was a catalyst for change, many of the ideas that came to the fore among interwar IR scholars were present in one form or another before the war. The interwar ideas of IR experts such as Angell and Brailsford, for example, were modifications of the views expressed in their prewar works. The war, though, had two major affects on IR and its relationship to the Labour Party. The first is that it increased the sense of urgency among international experts. Although the core ideas of people such as Angell or Woolf were little changed by the war, the consequences of hostilities gave international affairs an immediacy that had not existed before 1914. Groups, such as the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) were set up to discuss and disseminate ideas associated with international order, and for the first time the Fabians became interested in the shape of a future world order. Labour's links with many of the people in these groups (Ramsay MacDonald, like many Labour politicians, was a member of the UDC) meant that the Party benefited from the findings of these organizations when formulating its policy. It was the UDC and the Fabian movement that brought together the Labour leadership and the main IR thinkers of the interwar period. Second, it increased the perceived importance of international affairs among the wider electorate. The whole population had been affected by conscription, the war economy, and the wider costs of the war in both men and material. The foreign policies of the major political parties were now an important part of their appeal to the electorate. This was directly responsible for the changes in Labour's constitution in 1918, as well as the setting up of the ACIntQ. The membership of the ACIntQ reflected the links that the Labour leadership had with organizations such as the UDC and the Fabians. Thus, the First World War did not create a new discipline of IR, per se, but it certainly gave it a popularity and a link to party politics that it had never had before.

British IR in the first thirteen years after the Great War was dominated by the question of the role and structure of the League of Nations. This did not mean that there was a unity of purpose; in fact, the debates over what form the League should take in the new postwar order were often bitter and divisive. Modern IR textbooks often present interwar IR as a battleground between an idealist paradigm that supported the League and a realist one that did not. In fact, neither idealism nor realism as paradigms existed in the interwar period, and opposition to the League Covenant was just as likely to come from writers now written off as idealists.Footnote ¹⁶ In Britain, the League found ready support on the Right. Some, such as Lord Cecil, were genuinely interested in creating an alternative to the international anarchy that was seen as the root cause of the First World War. Others, such as F. E. Smith, the future Lord Birkenhead, supported the League because it was a League of sovereign states (or “cabinets,” to use the contemporary expression) and therefore was a help to interstate diplomacy, rather than the seed for an alternative world order.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, with a few exceptions, the question that shaped British IR before 1931 was not should the League exist, but rather: What kind of organization should the League develop into? This tied into a wider perception of the League as an unfinished work in progress, rather than a fully formed pooled security system.Footnote ¹⁸ The various positions on the League reflected differing views about the nature of IR, and in turn influenced debates within the Labour Party.

It is possible to tease out four positions toward the League, three of which were found in Labour Party debates on foreign policy. The only one of the four largely absent from Labour policy circles was the view that the League should remain a league of cabinets and that any attempt to create a League that was divorced from interstate diplomacy was an “idealist” mistake. It was not that these people were for a full return to the prewar international anarchy, but rather that they were looking for the creation of a League that would assist states in the maintenance of peace but not interfere with British imperial relations.Footnote ¹⁹ This group, which found favor with some Conservative politicians, as well as many Dominion statesmen such as Jan Smuts, had come away happy from the 1919 Paris peace conference. The League Covenant that had emerged from the negotiations had largely given them what they wanted. The League here was conceived of primarily as the sum of its members, and the state remained the basic unit of international relations.

Of the three remaining positions, all of which found key supporters within Labour, two supported the idea of the League, while the third opposed it as primarily a capitalist institution. The first of these remaining three was marked by its strong support for a system of League pooled security, which within the universities could be found in the work of Alfred Zimmern, C. Delisle Burns, Gilbert Murray, and David Mitrany. In the wider IR community outside of the universities it was advocated by Norman Angell, Leonard Woolf, Philip Noel Baker, Hugh Dalton, and William Arnold-Forster. Although differences existed between these writers, they were united by the view that the League needed to develop as an institution in its own right and that the legal agreements within the Covenant had to be tightened up in order to develop a proper pooled security system that would eliminate war between states. The major source of friction with others in the Labour Party was these writers' support for League sanctions, including military sanctions, as the basis of the League pooled security system. This group of writers dominated the ACIntQ and wrote many of the key international policy documents for Labour. This did not mean that they were always the dominant view in Labour circles. In fact, they were very much in the minority in the early 1920s, and their struggle to develop a Labour policy friendly to the ideas of League pooled security is the subject of Henry Winkler's 1994 book. Their main contribution to the theory of IR was to construct a concept of global order based on the interrelationship of arbitration, sanctions, and disarmament. Through their analyses of these three concepts, discussed below, Woolf, Angell, Mitrany, Arnold Forster, and the others in this group developed a view of international order that informed Labour foreign policy.

There is another aspect to this position that would become more important after 1931 and is central to their academic interpretation of the international sphere. While they opposed realpolitik and the international anarchy that had existed before 1914, they also regarded the self-help system of states where force is used to settle disagreements as the natural position that international politics will follow without conscious change. Thus, their work had two levels: it contained normative theories of change interlaced with an analysis of the workings of the international anarchy that the normative theories were intended to replace.Footnote ²⁰ This has implications for the period after 1931: when faced with the crumbling of the League pooled security system, many of these writers shelved their plans for reform of the League and began to deal with the immediate problem of policy formulation under the renewed international anarchy.

The advocates of pooled security backed the idea of reforming the League as it was currently constructed and came to oppose calls to completely renegotiate the Covenant. They were initially supported by the group of stricter pacifists who were receptive to the idea of the League but opposed the use of force.Footnote ²¹ Less prominent in university circles, the strict pacifists found stronger support among extramural experts. The works of Arthur Ponsonby, Helena Swanwick, and C.R. Buxton were particularly influential. While Ponsonby was also active in the 1924 Labour government as Ramsay MacDonald's number two at the foreign office (MacDonald served as prime minister and foreign secretary), the major figure from this group in the Labour leadership was George Lansbury, who was Labour leader after the election defeat of 1931. While this group supported the League, they opposed giving the League power to enforce pooled security through sanctions, whether economic or military. Rather, they favored developing the League as a force for moral suasion, attacking the advocates of pooled security for both encouraging “League wars” and for relying too heavily on the construction of legal norms that states would find it far too easy to wriggle out of.Footnote ²²

Lastly, there were those on the radical left who saw the League as a capitalist-inspired institution that was not capable of creating a lasting peace. The dispute between supporters of League pooled security and the radical left often took the form of a debate over whether capitalism was a cause of war. This capitalism and war debate was to come to a head in 1934–1935 with an exchange of letters in The New Statesman that were later collected and published by Henry Brinton.Footnote ²³ H. N. Brailsford drifted in and out of this group as the fortunes of the League changed. Initially supportive of the League idea, he strongly denounced the Covenant in the early 1920s, and only guardedly gave his support to the League after the success of MacDonald's diplomacy in 1924. Throughout this period, though, he continued to argue that the League's failure to deal with the underlying problems of capitalism meant that it could only ever be a partial solution. Harold Laski had drifted to this position in the mid-thirties, although his writing in the 1920s supported a pooled security approach.Footnote ²⁴ Radical left denunciations of the League remained strong among Labour activists and left-wing leaders, of which the most prominent was Stafford Cripps. A supporter of Lansbury, Cripps famously denounced the League as an International Burglar's Union.Footnote ²⁵ Cripps' argument that a functioning international order could only come about after the victory of socialism was one that frequently found favor with Brailsford and was popular among many in the Party who opposed the League and saw it as incapable of reform as long as capitalism remained.

Thus, we can tease out four positions in IR that were relevant to the formation of Labour's international policy in the 1920s. There were those who supported the idea of retaining the League as a “League of Cabinets” that would act as a support to the normal intercourse between sovereign states (“the conservatives”). This group wished to retain the central role of the sovereign state in IR and found favor with many in the Conservative Party (but not all, as the exception of Cecil shows). There were those who advocated reforming the League through the tightening up of its legal commitments to pooled security (“the reformers”). They regarded pooled security under the League as the only serious means of replacing “private war” between states. In terms of their view of the structure of international society, they were opposed to the concept of an exclusive state sovereignty and advocated the development of an international rule of law, backed up by force that would be analogous to the situation in domestic politics. The third group (“the strict pacifists”) opposed all use of force, including wars conducted by or for the League of Nations. They were critical of attempts to create legal guarantees because they believed that states would find a way to avoid their commitments. Finally, there were those who saw the League as fatally flawed due to the nature of capitalism (“the radical Left”). Only if the establishment of the League was preceded by a change to socialism could the League guarantee peace. The position of the conservatives found little favor in Labour circles and represented the stance of the Party's opponents on the right who wished to maintain both state sovereignty and the current imperial arrangements between Britain and the Empire. The reformers dominated the group of intellectuals and international experts within Labour and were the key group on the ACIntQ. The strict pacifists were also present on the ACIntQ and kept up a sustained debate with the reformers over issues such as the definition of an aggressor (necessary to any sanctions regime that targeted aggressors), the role of legal agreements in international affairs, and the nature of a future war sanctioned by the League. While the radical Left remained outside of the ACIntQ, its ideas were an important part of the foreign policy debate within Labour circles, and any policies proposed by the reformers would need to be defended against the radical Left in fora such as the annual Party conference.

While the development of Labour's international policy was framed by the debates between these four groups of IR experts, it is also important to bear in mind the extent to which this was new ground for all concerned. Prewar plans for peace and international government had been particularly vague. Labour and its experts were constructing a foreign policy with few precedents, and while the League became a reality in 1920, nobody was completely sure how it would work. On top of this, Labour had had no official role in constructing the Covenant (although Philip Noel Baker had been involved in its construction as an aide to Lord Cecil), and before 1924 it was making policy without any direct input into the creation of this new world. This makes Labour's shift from blanket opposition to the Covenant in 1919 to constructive engagement in 1924 even more of a remarkable sea-change. This change, which took vague prewar internationalist ideas and turned them into a coherent policy, was the work of both IR experts in the Party and major figures in the leadership.

Arbitrations, Sanctions, and Disarmament: Labour's Approach to the League

In the immediate fallout from the announcement of the contents of the Covenant, the dominant position in the Labour Party was that the Covenant would have to be completely renegotiated before any movement could be made on creating a postwar world order. This reaction to the Covenant was also evident in the ACIntQ, where H. N. Brailsford's memorandum on the question in 1919 argued that since the cause of war was the power politics of states, a League controlled by cabinets would not try to prevent war. “So long as international action is confided only to Governments, it may be doubted whether we shall ever escape from the obsession of force.”Footnote ²⁶ The League, as currently constructed, was unreformable. Yet, from 1920, when the League first sat, to 1924, when Labour entered government, the Party underwent a major change of heart. Winkler gives an excellent blow-by-blow account of this process.Footnote ²⁷ A major reason for the decision to work with the League as it was, and to drop calls for a revision of the Covenant, was that there was no guarantee that a renegotiation would lead to a stronger and less cabinet-led League. Indeed, an ACIntQ memorandum in 1923 warned that the “general tendency has been to revise the Covenant downward, that is, to regain as much freedom as possible for all States to do as they please and to abjure any binding international obligation.”Footnote ²⁸ Under the influence of intellectual experts in the ACIntQ, and with the active support of MacDonald and Henderson in the leadership, the Party was converted from opposition to the Covenant in 1920 to full support of the League in 1924. Winkler is right to see this as the result of the hard work of a small group in the Party, including the ACIntQ, but overplays the strength of anti-League feeling in the Party.Footnote ²⁹ This did not mean that the Party accepted the Covenant without reservations, and the work of the ACIntQ shifted to identifying the gaps in the Covenant that needed reform and to developing a concept of the new emerging international order that would make arbitration a viable alternative to war and, in turn, would allow states to disarm down to a level consistent with their obligations under the Charter. This, in turn, brought in the thorny question of League sanctions.

One of the major debates in IR between 1922 and 1931 was over the question of the relationship between disarmament, arbitration, and League sanctions (economic and military). Ostensibly this was about closing a major loophole in the League Covenant, but it also marked a significant split between two views of how the League should work. A number of the ACIntQ memoranda dealt with the issue of disarmament, arbitration, and sanctions, whether separately or together, and one of the biggest disagreements on the Committee revolved around the issue of defining sanctions. The reformers on the ACIntQ were concerned that Labour policy should be directed at closing what were known as the “gaps” in the Covenant. As it stood, they argued, the Covenant was not capable of supporting a pooled security system. While the Covenant required all members to submit disputes “likely to lead to rupture” to arbitration, judicial inquiry, or inquiry by the League Council (Article 11), and had made the immediate severance of trade and financial links between League members and an aggressor state mandatory (Article 16), there were still major gaps in the legal machinery of the League.Footnote ³⁰ First, there was no clear definition of aggressor in the Covenant; second, while arbitration and other peaceful methods of dispute settlement were mentioned, it was not clear what the correct procedure would be in different disputes; third, while disarmament “to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations” was made a condition of membership in Article 8, there was no definition of the “lowest point,” and no discussion on how disarmament would be handled; fourth, the Covenant had not removed the right of a state to go to war unilaterally; and fifth, the nature of appropriate sanctions in the event of aggression were not defined. In this sense, the League was seen as a work in progress by the reformers on the ACIntQ. Statesmen were still unsure how it should be used, and League officials were managing an organization whose powers were unclear.

These five “gaps” were all related. From the point of view of the reformers, disarmament, arbitration, and sanctions formed an interrelated triangle, necessary for the development of a system of pooled security under the League in which one could not be realized without the other two.Footnote ³¹ Disarmament was unlikely until a system of arbitration and conciliation that removed the necessity for armed defense had been constructed.Footnote ³² The issue of arbitration and conciliation carried with it the question of what to do if peaceful resolution failed. The issue of economic and military sanctions also affected the discussions of disarmament: what level of arms would be required by a sanctions regime, and in the absence of a sanctions regime would smaller states be willing to disarm? Sanctions also required a clear definition of aggression. Before 1931, the main split in Labour's ranks on foreign policy centered on whether the League needed sanctions in order to make arbitration and disarmament a reality within the League system. The issue of sanctions left the strict pacifists concerned about the prospect of a future “League war.” The major disagreement within the Party and the ACIntQ in the 1920s was over the question of whether sanctions were necessary for successful arbitration.

By the 1920s, there was already a history of successful arbitration, although each case before 1919 had been guaranteed by nothing more than the good will of the parties involved. Article 12 of the Covenant mentioned arbitration as one of three possible peaceful dispute settlements open to its members, the other two being judicial settlement and inquiry by the League Council. Article 14 of the Covenant required the parties to establish the Permanent Court of International Justice, which could be the arbiter of all judicial disputes between states once the states involved signed up to the Optional Clause that obligated them to accept the rulings of the Court. Discussions of the place of arbitration during the interwar period divided conflicts between states into judicial and nonjudicial (or political) disputes. There was widespread agreement in the ACIntQ between both reformers and strict pacifists that judicial disputes, which involved clear-cut cases of international law, could and should be submitted to arbitration, and that accepting binding arbitration by the Permanent Court in judicial disputes made sense.Footnote ³³ In 1929, the Second Labour Government accepted this argument when it signed the Optional Clause that bound Britain to arbitration by the Permanent Court.

A more vexing problem was nonlegal disputes, where the Permanent Court would not have the jurisdiction or the competence to adjudicate. The Labour Party, largely through the work of ACIntQ members, was committed to the creation of an all-inclusive arbitration regime that would include nonlegal disputes. In 1927, Leonard Woolf collaborated with William Arnold-Forster on a draft convention that would lay out the possible shape of a system of arbitration for nonlegal disputes. The League of Nations, as it stood, had a system of resolving nonlegal disputes through conciliation. Conciliation was not binding, and it did not require a renunciation of the use of force by the parties involved. There was no “open convention by means of which States can bind themselves to submit all nonlegal disputes to pacific settlement.”Footnote ³⁴ Woolf and Arnold-Forster's proposals involved a long process in which the dispute would go first to the Permanent Conciliation Commission of the League, to the League Council, and finally to a committee of arbitrators agreed to by the parties. Throughout the process “the parties undertake that, under no circumstances will they attack or invade each other's territory or resort to war unless in the fulfilment of their obligations as members of the League of Nations.”Footnote ³⁵ Obviously the whole proposal rested on the willingness of the parties to renounce war. In the final analysis, arbitration seemed unlikely to work as a stand-alone system of pacific settlement as long as there were no means to compel states to seek arbitration. For the reformers, the only way to ensure that arbitration worked was to tie it to a sanctions regime where those who refused to go to arbitration, and engaged in aggressive war, could be punished by the League.

In 1928, Hugh Dalton summarized the position of the reformers in the ACIntQ toward sanctions: “Some provision for sanctions and coercive action … is a logical requirement of any legal system, it takes human shape in police and judges.”Footnote ³⁶ This was far from being a universally accepted position in the Party and was deeply criticized by both strict pacifists and the radical Left—the former because sanctions still entrenched violence, and the later because they gave teeth to what was still regarded as a capitalist-run organization. Arthur Ponsonby supplemented his pacifist convictions with the view that the inability to define aggression accurately ruled out the value of sanctions for the League.Footnote ³⁷ The Geneva Protocol had provided a clear definition of aggressors—as those who refused to submit their dispute to arbitration while also engaging in hostilities—and from the point of view of the reformers, this remained clear and definitive.Footnote ³⁸ C. R. Buxton and Helena Swanwick disagreed, arguing that it was extremely unlikely that there was a will to use military sanctions in the Labour Party, the country as a whole, and the Dominions. Buxton was willing to countenance economic sanctions but felt that, on the whole, it was best to concentrate on the less contentious issues of arbitration and disarmament.Footnote ³⁹ Swanwick, on the other hand, felt that sanctions of any kind were likely to fail in times of stress between great powers.Footnote ⁴⁰ Even Ramsay MacDonald believed that, in the long term, the spirit of cooperation engendered by an arbitration regime would make sanctions unnecessary.Footnote ⁴¹ Thus, opposition to sanctions covered a wide spectrum, but we can distinguish between a blanket opposition to all sanctions, and an opposition exclusively to military sanctions. The advocates of sanctions addressed both questions.

At a minimum, it was pointed out that the whole League system rested on sanctions and would continue to do so as long as there was still the threat of the outbreak of private war by one state against another. Article 16 of the Covenant made economic sanctions mandatory in the event of aggression, and the threat of League sanctions had worked on minor belligerents in 1922 against Serbian troops and in 1925 against the Greeks.Footnote ⁴² Noel Baker argued that, at a bare minimum, an effective sanctions regime would reduce the risk of war by deterring possible aggressors.Footnote ⁴³ A more positive reason was the continued likelihood of war, and the consequent insecurity of many states, including many of the minor powers. The threat of sanctions was the only means the League had of guaranteeing that the Covenant would be respected. “And if ‘moral suasion’ is all that the League can oppose to the would-be Covenant-breaker's armed force, then sooner or later the League's bluff will be called.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Because many smaller states, and even larger ones like France, felt deeply insecure, a strong sanctions regime presented the only alternative to the buildup of arms. In other words, an effective sanctions regime would be the only way to wean many states off relying on their own force of arms for defense, and consequently, without sanctions, there could be no comprehensive international disarmament or arbitration regime.Footnote ⁴⁵

Military sanctions were more problematic. For Dalton, armed force should be “our last line of defense… But it is not possible to wipe it off the map.”Footnote ⁴⁶ For Mitrany, military sanctions “must remain an extreme measure, to be adopted only in exceptional circumstances.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The need for some form of military threat was given a slightly different twist by Arnold-Forster, who argued that economic sanctions would require a naval blockade and, thus, extensive use of the military if it was to be effective.Footnote ⁴⁸ While Mitrany supported sanctions, and saw them as indispensable to the League system, he was worried that obligatory sanctions might encourage states unwilling to contribute to a sanctions regime to “hamper the peace machinery of the League.” Thus, while “it is doubtful whether the League could keep the peace without sanctions,” their success, and consequently the success of the system of arbitration, rested uncomfortably on the willingness of states to act.Footnote ⁴⁹

All members of the Party could agree on the ultimate end of disarmament, where disarmament meant the reduction of arms, rather than their complete eradication. Arms were seen as a product of the wasteful system associated with the international anarchy and created instability by their very existence.Footnote ⁵⁰ For Philip Noel Baker the value of disarmament was twofold. It would save national resources for more productive enterprises and would ease international tensions by reducing states' abilities to wage aggressive war abroad.Footnote ⁵¹ All could agree that the sharp split in the Party on disarmament was not over its ultimate desirability, but rather on its relationship to security. While the strict pacifists advocated a disarmament by example that would convince all other states to disarm, the reformers saw disarmament as an outcome of a successful security policy based on League collective security. After the collapse of the Disarmament Conference in 1933 Norman Angell asked Arthur Henderson what he thought lay at the root of the failure of disarmament. Henderson “replied instantly: ‘the failure to tackle security effectively before we started on disarmament.’ That was the right reply and Henderson saw it more clearly than MacDonald.”Footnote ⁵² The two top experts on disarmament, Noel Baker and de Madariaga, agreed. For Noel Baker, disarmament must be built on security, while de Madariaga thought that an international spirit of cooperation had to replace the predominant one of conflict before disarmament could become a reality.Footnote ⁵³ The discussions on disarmament at the League seemed to back this view. France, supported by many smaller states, continued to link disarmament to a guarantee of its security, whether that was adequate League sanctions or a system of military guarantees. “The reef upon which every scheme of Disarmament so far has been shipwrecked is Defence, Security.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, progress in disarmament was once again linked to the question of inclusive arbitration and effective sanctions.

The central idea of guaranteeing security through a sanctions regime in order to make arbitration and disarmament possible remained central to Labour's foreign policy in both the 1924 and 1929–1931 governments. It was vital to the 1924 Geneva Protocol that had been a priority of Ramsay MacDonald's diplomacy, and it was behind the diplomacy that paved the way for the opening of the Disarmament Conference that finally convened after Labour's defeat in 1931. Sanctions, though, remained a contentious issue. Within the ACIntQ, despite opposition from strict pacifists such as C. R. Buxton, sanctions were an important part of the discussion of the possibilities of arbitration and disarmament. Sanctions were also widely discussed in the books produced by Labour's intellectuals.Footnote ⁵⁵ Despite this strong support for sanctions among the reformers on the ACIntQ and among key members of the leadership in the Party, Labour's official electoral material failed to mention it at all. Labour and the Nation, the Party's official statement of its policies published in 1928, mentioned both arbitration and disarmament, but sanctions—the third pillar in the reformers' schema for a successful League pooled security system—is never mentioned.Footnote ⁵⁶ The reformers themselves, however, were complicit in this screaming silence, since it was two of their number (Woolf and Noel Baker) who wrote the international policy part of Labour and the Nation. At one level this was disingenuous, since both these authors and Henderson (the commissioner of Labour and the Nation) believed that sanctions were necessary. At another, however, it showed the continued strength of the strict pacifists and the radical left in the Party. Their sustained opposition to sanctions meant that Party unity could only be assured if the less troublesome issues of arbitration and disarmament were mentioned on their own. How arbitration and disarmament could be accomplished without sanctions was never made clear.

Labour after 1931 and the Prospects for a Socialist Foreign Policy

The fragile Party unity on foreign affairs that Labour and the Nation's careful omissions helped to foster fell apart after 1931. The defection of part of the leadership to the National Government and the heavy losses in the 1931 election left the Parliamentary Labour Party under the leadership of the strict pacifist George Lansbury. With another strict pacifist, Arthur Ponsonby, leading Labour in the House of Lords and the radical leftist Stafford Cripps, favored by Lansbury as the next leader of the Party, the position of the reformers was undermined. With the failure of League pooled security in Manchuria in 1931 and Abyssinia in 1935–1936 and the breaking up of the Disarmament Conference in 1933, the idea of closing the gaps in the Covenant increasingly took a back seat to the question of how to deal with the immediate problem of fascist aggression. Yet, the reformers were not silent. They continued to dominate the ACIntQ, and found new allies in the leadership in the form of Walter Citrine, J. R. Clynes, and Ernest Bevin. While Noel Baker remained committed to a policy of closing the gaps, other reformers put this on the back burner and turned instead to the immediate issue of how to construct an antifascist alliance based around the pro-League powers. This brought them into immediate conflict with the strict pacifists and the radical Left. The resignations of Ponsonby and Lansbury from their leadership roles—under pressure from Citrine, Bevin, and others—and of C. R. Buxton from the chairmanship of the ACIntQ, marked the return of the reformers' influence in the Party. The only difference between the late thirties and the twenties was that the reformers were now advocating a policy of British resistance to fascist demands outside of the League structure of pooled security. The intellectual ideas of the reformers remained the same—they were committed to a strict League pooled security system—but in the absence of a strong League it was necessary for the League powers, like Britain, to oppose aggressive states in order to recreate the conditions necessary for a proper pooled security system.Footnote ⁵⁷

This move was consistent with the reformers' view that, while a strict League pooled security system was desirable and necessary in the long term, in the absence of the will to do this among states, the international system would fall back on the self-help realpolitik that had existed before 1914. If this happened, then it was important to work within this logic and to construct the conditions for a new attempt at pooled security by bringing together like-minded states in a system of collective defense. This led them to push for resistance to fascism and thus to oppose the appeasement policy of the National Government. This is not to wholly discount the critics of the reformers in the Labour Party, especially the strict pacifists. While the reformers would, in hindsight, be praised for their early stand against fascism in the 1930s, there were flaws in their pro-League policy in the 1920s. These flaws had been spotted by pacifists Helena Swanwick and Arthur Ponsonby and had been part of Ramsay MacDonald's own lowering of sights after 1924. The idea that the closing of the gaps in the Covenant would lead to an effective system of sanctions, arbitration, and disarmament rested on two unsupportable assumptions: 1) that legal agreements, if strict enough, would be honored by states; and 2) that there was a will among the publics in the League powers more generally, but Britain in particular, to use force to bring an aggressor to heal. States, as Swanwick pointed out, had been finding ways to break legal agreements for centuries. The reformers gave no clear indication of why “now” was different.Footnote ⁵⁸ Experience between 1931 and 1936 would show how easy it was for the League powers to find ways to minimize their commitments under the Covenant. Similarly, the general opposition among the British public to sanctions and foreign commitments meant that the virtuous triangle of sanctions, arbitration, and disarmament was probably a nonstarter. To be fair, the gaps in the Covenant were never closed, and therefore the system was never properly tested, but the signs were not as positive as the reformers liked to claim. Thus, Britain's first socialist foreign policy, complex and intellectually well-thought out though it seemed, was not without its flaws.

Yet, to what extent was the international policy pushed by the reformers socialist? After all, many of the ideas of international government that underpinned the policy of the reformers came from earlier liberal thought and were often advocated in Labour by former members of the Liberal and Conservative Parties. Here, though, we find one of the great contributions of the reformers to Labour. They took what were liberal ideas of international order and placed them in a larger social democratic context. There were two aspects to this. First, the reformer's approach to the League was consistent with the social democratic concept of the shell state that the state is a mechanism that takes on the ideological hue of those who run it. The same principle was applied to the emerging international machinery of the League. Labour and the Nation, for example, saw the League as the machinery with which Labour could cooperate with the rest of the world.Footnote ⁵⁹ Hugh Dalton in 1928 represented the League as “only an unusually elaborate piece of international machinery. Its value will depend upon who handles it, and upon the spirit and motives and competence with which it is handled.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Since, according to democratic socialist thinking, socialism could only be established within the context of a shell state, what the reformers were constructing was the institutional arrangements necessary for the establishment of a shell state internationally. This had to be a shell state of a particular kind, and the Branting Resolution at the 1919 Berne Conference of labor and socialist parties had stated that democratic institutions were a necessary precondition for socialism. In viewing the League as a form of shell state, the reformers in Labour were clearly at odds with the radical left. The former advocated building the international machinery first, and then using it to abolish capitalism, while the latter believed that institutions built while capitalism still prospered would be capitalist in nature too.

Second, Labour figures saw being more pacific and “internationally minded” as central attributes of socialism.Footnote ⁶¹ While values like peace and internationalism would have been shared by an earlier radical liberal tradition, this did not make it any less part of the socialist world view. This self-image of social democracy was shared by reformers and radical socialists alike, although with the reformers it became associated with the establishment of an effective League. This association of peace and internationalism with socialism was based on a view of capitalism as the source of the inequalities that led to war, and the capitalist state as an impediment to the development of an international class consciousness. Thus, for the reformers, a League that promoted peace and an international ethos was consistent with the broader goals of socialism. The League may not have been socialist, but its existence could be part of the development of a socialist world.

Whatever our assessment of its socialist credentials and long-term practicality, Labour's foreign policy in the 1920s was a product of the latest thought in the new academic discipline of IR. In this sense Labour, through its recruitment of experts and its use of the ACIntQ, forged a policy that was on the intellectual cutting edge of international thought. While it can be criticized for relying too heavily on the League, this is a criticism that could be levelled at all three of the major political parties in Britain at the time. In the 1920s the League was seen as a reality; the only question was what form that reality should take in the future. Labour's answer, thanks to the work of its international experts, was that the League should be the basis of a new international legal system that settled disputes between states peacefully. Only when the threat of war had been removed could the work of building an international socialist society begin.