A new world order: The Labour Party, internationalism and postwar political organisation, 1939-1951

Between the wars, the British Labour Party professed an internationalist foreign policy, which viewed the League of Nations as the embryo of an international government or "cooperative world Commonwealth" which would regulate and ultimately supersede the system of sovereign states whose rivalries had brought the world to the brink of disaster in 1914. In the same way that the component nations of Britain had set aside their sectional differences and forged a single polity under a common law, Labour policymakers argued that the world must develop international political organisations to reflect and uphold its peoples' common desire for peace, freedom and equality.; This "Whig" internationalism was severely shaken, however, by the collapse of the League at the beginning of the Second World War. In the wake of the destruction of the Wilsonian world order at the hands of Nazi Germany, Labour theorists began to elaborate a new style of internationalism, one which saw the primary function of the world authority as the imposition of the rule of law upon the nations, if necessary by force. "Muscular" internationalism consequently envisaged the postwar international organisation as a far more powerful and obtrusive entity than the League had ever been, in which the Great Powers including Britain would lay down and enforce internal as well as international norms in the interest of humanity.; This dissertation analyses the controversy within the party between these competing paradigms of international organisation during a decade which witnessed perhaps the most wide-ranging foreign policy debate in Labour's history. Examining the two principal models of postwar international government--the United Nations and a mooted European federation--the dissertation discusses the impact of war upon Labour's concept of power as a factor in international affairs and the party's redefinition of its fundamental foreign policy goals; the contribution of Labour policymakers and politicians to the creation of the new world order; the relationship between Labour internationalism and governance of the colonial empire; and the heated internal debate over the attempt in the late 1940s to build a political authority with "limited functions but real powers" in Western Europe.