The British Left and the Road to Military Intervention in the Former Yugoslavia, 1991–99

This study examines the British Left’s engagement with the prospect of military intervention during the collapse of Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999. It argues that the Yugoslav Wars were a watershed moment for the Labour Party and extra–Parliamentary Left, as they led to the development of an increasingly interventionist consensus and thus profoundly contributed to the transformation of the Left’s political identity in the 1990s. It situates this changing consensus within broader schisms on the Left on salient issues, notably, the consequences of globalisation; the meaning of anti-racism and ‘anti-imperialism’; the ‘modernisation’ of Labour; and the rise of a hegemonic United States following the end of the Cold War. This study joins a small body of revisionist scholarship which challenges the ‘conventional wisdom’ that Britain’s interventionist trajectory can be solely attributed to ‘New’ Labour and Tony Blair’s leadership from 1997. While accepting that ‘New’ Labour was instrumental in putting intervention into practice during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, it nonetheless holds that a significant minority interventionist current developed on the British and wider European Left long before ‘New’ Labour took power or showed particular interest in the issue. Drawing on internal Labour party records, the Parliamentary record, private collections from activists, agitprop produced by left–wing groups, and the left-wing press, this study approaches the Left’s international thinking from the perspective of those who fought to shape the narrative on a changing Left in changing times.