The 9/11 attacks brought greater urgency to the debate within Europe and the United States over the role of Western foreign policies in contributing to hostile feeling towards the West among Muslims. In analysing different American policy responses to political Islam prior to 9/11, Fawaz Gerges provided a framework by identifying two broad categories. The first is confrontationalist and the second is accommodationist. Confrontationalists tend to see Israel as an ally in containing Islamism as an anti-Western threat. Accommodationists reject the idea of a unified Islamist threat, and tend to see the Israeli-Palestinian issue as a grievance which exacerbates tensions between Islam and the West. This thesis explores this debate in the British context. It looks specifically at the impact of 9/11 and the associated developments in international affairs on the Blair government's policy in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. It builds on existing accounts by analysing interviews with key personnel in the Blair government, conducted by the author, as well as official records, statements and documents. It also examines the impact of the domestic counter-radicalisation agenda on policy making in the Israeli-Palestinian arena, drawing on previously unpublished material released to the author under the Freedom of Information Act. It is argued that the heightened awareness of the challenge of Islamism created a new situation, whereby the Israeli-Palestinian arena became linked by policy makers to Britain's national security. Applying the accommodationist-confrontationalist distinction to the UK context clarifies the difference in view between Blair and others in his party, and in the government, over the role played by the Israeli-Palestinian issue in the relationship between Islam and the West. Sections of the Labour party and the Foreign Office tended towards the accommodationist approach. Blair's position, however, became increasingly confrontationalist over time, leading to major rifts within government.

This thesis critically examines the idea of 'globalisation' in the New Labour discourse over the period 1996- 2001, challenging the version articulated by key members of the party. This task involves contesting and reinterpreting the implications imputed to the process both at the domestic and international levels. The understanding and implications of 'globalisation' have changed over time. It herefore distinguish two phases. The first phase I associate exclusively with Tony Blair. This understanding focuses on the domestic significance of globalisation, and conflates the process with liberalisation. In this phase globalisation functions to de-politicise a 'third way' agenda, which is presented as if it were the only logical alternative for a party of the centre left. A second phase, the chief contributors to which are Tony Blair and Robin Cook, concentrates on the international significance of globalisation. Both argue for a move beyond traditional realist approaches to foreign policy, stressing instead the role globalisation plays in creating a 'global interest'. Drawing upon developments in the literature, the thesis challenges the New Labour position firstly by questioning the implications of globalisation drawn out by them, as empirically untenable. Globalisation does not necessarily limit the room for manoeuvre in the way suggested by Blair, nor does it imply an increased harmony of interests forming around the idea of a global interest. However, in offering an alternative interpretation this study highlights that globalisation should not merely be understood in terms of whether its usage is right or wrong. In addition, the thesis argues for a critical hermeneutic approach to be taken on the topic. It is argued that the current form globalisation takes is reproduced because it functions in particular contexts to serve a political agenda within the party. This reveals an ideological dimension in the discourse, drawing attention to the ways in which the meaning of globalisation is manipulated in order to serve an alternative set of interests not declared in the discourse itself, thereby manifesting itself in a particular form over time.

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The objective of this dissertation is to understand how the legitimacy of the state’s international use of PMSCs is evolving in contemporary international society. The first part of the dissertation develops an analytical framework that combines theoretical propositions of the English School and the ‘German’ constructivist strand with a reflective-analyticist philosophical ontology and with content and discourse analytical methods. The empirical part of the dissertation provides an overview of contemporary state practice, investigates how international society has responded to state practice in the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly, and finally analyses the roles of members of world society in creating and shaping this discourse. The empirical analysis points to two major driving forces behind the increased legitimation of the practice. First, the recursive relationship between behaviour and norms means that widespread use of PMSCs reinforces legitimacy. Second, normative shifts in international society have contributed to the legitimation of the practice. On the one hand, norms that are in tension with an expanded PMSC use have become weaker or sidelined, if still strongly supported by some actors: this is the anti-mercenary norm, and particular understandings of self-determination and the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. On the other hand, and partly linked to the weakening of the latter norms, human rights have gained strength as legitimacy principles. In the contestation over the state use of PMSCs, conflicting moves toward legitimation and delegitimation do not cancel each other out. Rather, structural and more immediate factors put strategic efforts and inadvertent moves of legitimation at an advantage while at the same time marginalizing calls for a reduction or prohibition of the state practice. I examine not only how human rights contribute to the legitimation of the practice, but also why and how actors that seek to limit, contain, or reverse the state practice have increasingly lost ground. Overall, the dissertation contributes to empirical research by substantiating claims of an increased legitimation of PMSC use. It also contributes to the broader IR discipline by proposing a change in perspective: away from an atomistic focus on norms to a more holistic study of legitimacy and legitimation. The resulting framework is particularly fruitful for the analysis of other controversial issues of international relations.

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To what extent can ethics and foreign policy be conceived as possible? Instead of answering within the implied dichotomy of possibility and impossibility, this thesis argues for a reconceptualisation of the dichotomy. Ethics and foreign policy are better understood on the basis of undecidability: neither simply possible nor impossible, but both at the same time. A deconstructive reading of British (1997-2006) and EU (1999- 2004) foreign policy, both of which make claims to ethics, reveals how the issue is beset by internal contradictions, paradoxes and aporias. The deconstruction is structured around the concepts of subjectivity, responsibility and hospitality, each of which constitutes an important point of undecidability within British and EU representations of their ethical dimension. The subject of ethics and foreign policy is always haunted and inhabited by its object, responsibility is necessarily irresponsible, and hospitality contains an irrepressible hostility. Thus, ethics and foreign policy is best conceived as undecidably im-possible. However, such undecidability cannot be used to justify abandoning the goal of an ethical foreign policy. Rather, a Derridean 'negotiation' is proposed. Negotiation seeks to remain loyal to the dual injunction of deconstruction, an undecidability which is the condition of ethics and politics, and a decision which decides, and closes to certain figures of otherness. It requires a permanent questioning, testing and invention of the promise of ethics and foreign policy. This produces a range of illustrative suggestions for the possible enactment of an ethico-political foreign policy, which would refer to and strive for an ultimately unrealisable ethical foreign policy. This research contributes a fundamental critique and questioning of the possibility of ethics and foreign policy. It provides a revealing exploration of British and EU foreign policy from the period, based around responsibility and hospitality. Finally, the thesis introduces the Derridean notion of negotiation to the discipline, seen as a way of moving through the potential paralysis brought by the undecidability arising from foundational questioning.

This thesis examines Britain's foreign policy identity by analysing the use of geopolitical tropes in discursive practices of ontological security-seeking in the British House of Commons since 1949, a period of great change for Britain as it lost its empire and joined NATO and the EC. The Empire was narrated according to a series of geopolitical tropes that I call Island Race identity: insularity from Europe and a universal aspect on world affairs, maintenance of Lines of Communication, antipathy towards Land Powers and the Greater Britain metacommunity. The aim of this thesis is to genealogically historicise and contextualise these tropes through interpretivist analysis of Commons debates concerning a series of events and issues from the establishment of NATO to the current parliament. By conceptualising parliamentary discourse as a social practice involving the fixing of ontologically secure subject positions, it presents a new reading of modern British foreign policy that addresses the traditional neglect of geopolitics and identity in approaches depicting a materially declining state engaging in the pragmatic pursuit of realist national interests. The analysis shows how Britain's foreign policy identity continues to be reliant on the geopolitical constitutions of islandness that discursively defined the empire. This is not indicative of imperial nostalgia so much as it is evidence of how discursive practices of ontological security-seeking in a political environment with a shared debating culture tend to mobilise established identity tropes that have retained relevance even without their imperial underpinnings. Narrations of the Cold War and NATO, relations with the rest of Europe and globalisation are shown to be reliant on Island Race tropes that, through contextual interactions, fix Britain in subject positions of relevance according to how British values, forged by insular geography, are of universal relevance to a world in which Britain is in a pivotal geopolitical position.