Henry R. Winkler - Paths Not Taken: British Labour and International Policy in the 1920s

1994 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Winkler, Henry R. (Henry Ralph), 1916
Paths not taken: British labour and international policy in the 1920s
/ Henry R. Winkler
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-8078-2171-3 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Great Britain-Foreign relations-1910-1936. 2. Labour Party
(Great Britain)History. I. Title.
DA578.W475 1994
327.41-dc20
94-4590
CIP

98 97 96 95 94 5 4 3 2 1

Published with the help of the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund,
University of Cincinnati.

Many years ago, I tried to suggest in a couple of articles the process by which the British labor movement transformed a set of foreign policy attitudes that were the propaganda of a tiny minority group into positions that, however controversial, were the program of a party prepared to face the responsibilities of government and of international diplomatic intercourse. My intention then was to flesh out what were essentially shorthand sketches in a fuller investigation of the step-by-step interplay among Labour's policy makers and the handful of organs of Labour opinion that served them with their rank and file.

For a variety of reasons not particularly relevant here, I was diverted from those intentions and spent the better part of three fulfilling decades in administrative responsibilities at Rutgers University and the University of Cincinnati. As an aside, I tend to think that those responsibilities in public institutions helped give me a better sense of the political process and of how the politicians' world of compromise and give-and-take must of necessity operate. Now, in retirement, I have turned to an unfinished task. My intention is not to reproduce once again the story of Labour's foreign policy after the First World War. That has more than adequately been done. Instead, I have wanted to follow the emerging and conflicting patterns that characterized Labour's discussion of policy in the twenties and that resulted, by the end of the decade, in what might have been a viable and reasonably responsible posture had not all the assumptions of the twenties been quickly shattered in the tragic dissolution of European order during the thirties.

As is always the case, my obligations are many. I am grateful to the University of Cincinnati for giving me a sabbatical year at the end of my tenure as president, to its Research Council for a generous grant to facilitate my work, and to its Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund for aid in publication. Librarians at the Public Record Office, the divisions of the British Library, and the various college and university depositories listed in my bibliography have been invariably helpful. I am especially beholden to Dr. Angela Raspin of the Manuscript Room of the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics, to Stephen Bird, Archivist at the Labour

party headquarters, to Norman Higson, Archivist of the Brynmor Jones Library of the University of Hull, to Sally Moffitt, Associate Librarian of the Walter Langsam Library of the University of Cincinnati, and to my Assistant, Mrs. Marie Ludeke. All of them provided help substantially beyond the call of academic duty.

I have had the great good fortune to number my most perceptive critics among the members of my family. My daughter, Karen J. Winkler of the