The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939-1951
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Labour's return to power in 1997, and the remarkable salience of international affairs in the politics of the subsequent decade, has generated a renewed interest in the historical development of the Labour Party's foreign policy. Among this recent literature R.M. Douglas's account of policy-formation in the 1940s takes a particularly fresh and perceptive look at a crucial phase in Labour's engagement with the problems of war, peace and international order. Douglas focuses on the challenge posed by the failure of the League of Nations, the military defeat of 1940, and the unpredicted outcomes of the Second World War. Although many in the Labour Party were slow to accept it, the League-oriented supranationalism of the inter-war years was no longer a viable option in 1945, and a new, more ‘realist' thinking, which was in turn modified by the onset of the Cold War, was emerging. Douglas develops a complex argument—perhaps unduly so at times—and complicates matters by offering a very narrow interpretation of ‘internationalism'. In this book, internationalism equates to Labour's thinking about international law and authority, and there is no consideration of the meaning better understood within party circles of fraternal relations with fellow socialist parties. Instead, Douglas presents a detailed study of the evolution of policy with regard to questions of international organisation (as well as some specific topics, such as colonialism and European integration), based on Labour Party and government archives and the private papers of Labour officials and policy-makers. The result is a compelling account of how Labour's idealism was gradually stripped away in favour of—by the end of the Attlee governments—a hard-nosed realism bent on upholding Britain's great power status, albeit one that worked through institutions such as the UN and NATO. As Douglas puts it, the book describes ‘the ultimate abandonment of internationalism as the distinctive ideological hallmark of the British left' (p. 5). This would give way, in the 1950s, to the proliferation of single-issue campaigns such as CND. However, one problem with a monograph such as this is that Douglas is unable to test this latter point as fully as it deserves. Had he carried the study forward, for instance, he would have encountered Tony Benn, in a diary entry for 27 March 1964, hoping that ‘there would be a big change, especially in relation to the United Nations, through which I thought a Labour Government would conduct its foreign policy more fully'. Internationalist idealism was, therefore, far from dead after 1951.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it