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Reformers have had a choice of political instrument since parties and pressure groups both emerged during England’s Cavalier Parliament. There have been twelve partisan configurations, in all but one of which parties have selected certain issues and left the rest to groups, which worked with independent-minded backbenchers. The first five configurations—structured by attitudes towards the court, James II, the Hanoverian succession, George III, and the social order—left considerable policy space for non-partisan reformers. During the exceptional sixth configuration, the era of the first two reform acts, groups agitated so effectively that parties accepted some of their demands: in the process the Tories were transformed into Conservatives and the Whigs into Liberals, while the scope for group and backbench activism was reduced. The seventh configuration saw both parties become more disciplined and develop broad alternative programmes, causing many groups to affiliate with one or the other. The eighth configuration, the era of two world wars, was complicated by Labour’s gradual supersession of the Liberals and by continuous international crisis. The ninth, 1945–70, saw Labour and the Conservatives dominate the domestic agenda. During the tenth and eleventh configurations, both parties first became more extreme, partly to manage the trade union movement, and then, with that most powerful of groups tamed, moderated their ideological positions. The twelfth, since 2016, has seen the parliamentary system become dysfunctional, the two main parties fragmenting internally over how to interpret and respond to the Brexit referendum.

Since its emergence in the late eighteenth century the peace movement has been a coalition of two groups: absolutists, who reject military force in all circumstances and are what the English-speaking world normally understands as ‘pacifists’; and reformists, who work to abolish war but accept that until this is achieved force may legitimately be used for self-defence or for upholding international law and who have received the academic label ‘pacificists’. Both groups are highly variegated. Pacifists have been divided along three main dimensions: the degree of violence which makes war unacceptable, the inspiration for rejecting war, and the policy implications of doing so. Pacificists have been divided mainly on ideological grounds because liberals, radicals, socialists, feminists, and ecologists have had different explanations for war.

This article revisits the author's pioneering archival work on the world's leading peace association of the nineteenth century, the London Peace Society (LPS), to focus on its distinctive strategy for dealing with the fact that from the outset, the peace movement had two distinct wings, absolutist (the small core of pacifists) and reformist (the rather larger penumbra of pacificists). Unlike other early such associations, which adopted different membership strategies, the LPS catered to both wings but in a two-tier hierarchy: Its top tier, the national committee that determined its policy, was strictly pacifist and rejected even defensive war, but no such stringency of belief was required of the bottom tier of ordinary members, which therefore contained many pacificists. Top-tier pacifism served the LPS well for half a century, in particular enabling it to outperform its American counterpart, but for the next half-century caused it to fall between two stools by disappointing absolutists as well as reformists. It was tacitly abandoned as the LPS plunged into steep decline on passing its centenary and was repudiated on the eve of the Second World War.

The First World War led to the reconstruction and reinvigoration of the British peace movement, which steadily increased in activity and impact from 1914 until the end of the 1930s. This article defines the movement, explains why it emerged first and developed most influentially in Britain, and outlines the various phases of its history from the 1790s until the present day. It concentrates on the less well known phases of the movement's history: its origins during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and on its moments of political significance during the nineteenth century. It says less about the post-1945 movement, which readers of International Affairs will be more familiar with, though it makes the point that �peace� is currently being trumped as the primary political goal of most progressives by �human rights�, which can be invoked to justify military intervention.

It is rarely pointed out that in pioneering collective security the Covenant of the League of Nations contained two approaches to that policy: enforced pacific settlement favoured in moderate-minimum form by the British (and in particular Lord Robert Cecil); and guaranteed mutual defence, promoted by President Wilson. Though not incompatible, they had very different political resonances. Enforced pacific settlement could be introduced gently, by limiting the pacific-settlement procedures that states were required to follow. By contrast, guaranteed mutual defence looked like a commitment to fight, not for international law, but for every detail of a controversial political and territorial status quo. Thus the Covenant's central element was a British scheme for enforced delay and inquiry, and its Achilles’ heel was Article 10, insisted upon by Wilson but rejected by the Senate. In consequence, the most effective provisions of an incoherent Covenant proved to lie outside the area of collective security, part...

Norman Angell's The Great Illusion, which ran through six versions in London between November 1909 and December 1938, has some claim to have launched International Relations as a self-consciously independent yet sub-consciously liberal discipline. Understood to argue primarily that the interlocking fragility of the international financial system stopped modern states profiting from aggression, its ideas were promoted by a specially created foundation as ‘the science of international politics’ or ‘international polity’. Since the 1970s, moreover, the book has been credited by scholars with pioneering the concepts of interdependence and globalisation. Now, therefore, it is less its seminal qualities than its fundamental flaws that require emphasis. Its celebrated claim about the irenic implications of financial interdependence was widely misunderstood as implying the impossibility, in addition to the disutility, of aggression. And a little-noticed second argument – that political control over territory brought no substantive benefits – was not only implausible but inconsistent with Angell's declared opposition to cuts in arms spending. The Great Illusion's policy recommendations were thus ambiguous, and altered from edition to edition as its author grappled first with the contradiction between pacifist and pro-defence strands in his thinking and then with the changing international situation.

This chapter explores Murray's activity and thinking in international relations. It traces the development of what was always an aristocratic Liberalism, one which included a disdain for ‘small dark races’. It shows how Murray, the apologist for British foreign policy in World War I, slowly transmuted into Murray the internationalist in the late 1910s and 1920s, and how his liberalism turned to conservatism in his later years.