Introduction

Labour's foreign policy has been given relatively little attention primarily because the party had almost no experience in office during the period. During the Second World War and after, however, Labour's leaders served first as key members of the coalition prosecuting the war and then as a government with a huge majority responsible for the conduct of British foreign policy in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. The move towards realism accelerated as the Labour Party took office for the first time in 1924, when its relative success in foreign affairs under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald helped turn the party further away from emphasis on sterile criticism. Until the First World War, Labour demanded the rejection of "militarism" in the hands of capitalist and imperialist governments and argued that war itself could only be avoided by the cooperation of the working classes, by socialist governments in much of the advanced world.