This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Frames of reference vary by culture, country and group, and political parties are no exception. A Conservative Party that draws pride and purpose from Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher naturally emphasises an active, even interventionist, approach to foreign policy and employs “appeasement” negatively. But what is the “deep history” of Tory attitudes to foreign policy? That offers a perspective on the Conservative position today, one that can be incorporated into analyses of changes in attitude, or seen as part of a continuing breach with pre-1939 attitudes. If the latter, did these earlier attitudes have merit and retain value?
From its origins in the late 17th century, the Tory Party tended towards opposition in word and deed to allegedly feckless interventionism.
This promotion of the “national interest”, caution and prudence lasted across the centuries. The characteristic features of 18th century Tory foreign policy are generally regarded as insularity, a focus on maritime power in defence of trade routes and Empire, an aversion to Continental commitments and a marked lack of enthusiasm for Whig calls for international intervention. It thus embraced doubts about grand European alliances, opposition to external international projects which impaired Britain’s freedom of manoeuvre, scepticism about the idea of the balance of power, and an non-ideological pragmatism in approach and practice. It opposed what was later seen as “regime change”.
In whole or part, these themes and attitudes can be identified as a typical Tory stance. They were linked to the Tory concern about an over-expanded and expensive state, as well as avoidance of the burden of taxation necessary to maintain a large army and Continental commitments, the last including subsidy treaties to allies and the hiring of foreign units to fight in the British army.
In contrast, the Whig tradition was one of collective security, a system of mutual guarantees that required continual oversight and frequent intervention. The Whigs referred back to historical justifications in terms of Elizabeth I and Oliver Cromwell.
However, in practice, Elizabeth had been cautious about making a full commitment on behalf of the Dutch rebels and war with Spain had not begun until 1585. The Cromwellian republic had been an atypical British government, with an unusually strong army and navy. The Tories in the 18th century drove home the idea that Continental interventionism was linked to corruption and the money interest.
In 1771, Samuel Johnson asked “how we can be recompensed for the death of multitudes, and the expense of millions, but by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, contractors and commissioners, these harmless vultures of the field”.
From that perspective, the present zeal to increase military expenditure would have been seen as misplaced, whilst the Tory criticism of confrontation with Russia in 1718–21 contrasts greatly with current attitudes towards the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
There was also a climbdown from confrontation with Russia in the Ochakov Crisis of 1791, in which many “Independent” MPs deserted the interventionist line, leading William Pitt the Younger to abandon the policy and its foundation, an alliance with Prussia, and to turn instead to isolationism, refusing to join the Austro-Prussian attack on France in 1792.
The Ochakov Crisis, however, underlines the problems sometimes involved in defining the Tory stance, as in 1791 both the Independent MPs and Pitt can be seen as Tories whilst the formal Opposition was Whig, led in the Commons by Charles James Fox. Thus, alongside long-term continuities in attitude and policy, there were also essentially political responses in specific circumstances, responses in which the faces of government and opposition played a major role.
There was also an important psychological element. An underlying Tory pessimism affected Conservative domestic thinking and was extended to foreign policy, with a marked lack of confidence about the ability of governments to fix outcomes, and therefore caution about alliances and commitments.
Tories drew on experience showing human effort could not produce a perfect society, domestic or international. Traditional Tory refrains focused on the impermanence of human actions and achievements, and on the risks of moralism, not least its threat to a balanced assessment of risks and opportunities.
Furthermore, the idea that a system based on the views and interests of others was inherently flawed constituted a major theme in Tory thought. The emphasis on the uncertainty of human affairs reflected a distinct religious, moral and intellectual position. Tories prided themselves on realism, an appreciation of an international anarchy in which there was no reason to assume that allies would act well.
Mist’s Weekly Journal, the leading London Tory newspaper, in its issue of 4 June 1726, claimed, “We are not to depend upon being always in friendship with any Prince, those people who well consider the different interests of two nations will be of opinion that a true and lasting amity is not to be expected.” Tory patriotism thus proposed a self-sufficiency, an emphasis on nation rather than on government.
At the outset of Tory ministerial politics, Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham, a secretary of state from 1689 to 1693 and from 1702 to 1704, proved particularly significant in that he encouraged the development of “Blue Water” policies with their focus on maritime strength and activity. This contribution was taken forward during the 1710–14 Tory ministry by Viscount Bolingbroke and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and their example set the tone of Tory thought on foreign policy.
The critique of Whiggery for unnecessary wars and excessive taxes looked forward to William Pitt the Younger’s support for peace, imperial preference and low taxes in the 1780s. Pitt’s peacetime stance, in turn, was seen as an inspiration for 19th century Tories, such as Benjamin Disraeli. He presented the Tories as a national party, offering a contrast with what was depicted as the cosmopolitan rootlessness of other political groups, notably Whigs, Liberals and those Tories who were led astray, which was how Sir Robert Peel was described.
Seeking economy, notably in the early 1870s when he pressed the need for caution about expensive expansionist projects, Disraeli, nevertheless, was no isolationist. He argued that it was necessary to preserve the appropriate system and situation in Europe as well as Britain and in the late 1870s employed deterrence as a response to Russian expansionism.
This was in line with a foreign policy tradition emphasising the pragmatic defence of national interests in which both Empire and Europe took a part, each interpreted with reference to particular conjunctures. Earlier, with the Revolutionary French threatening to reject the international order and take over the Low Countries, Pitt the Younger had perforce become a war prime minister in 1793, and the Tories mobilised the nation for a battle of survival.
Then, in the face of repeated defeats from 1794, pragmatic issues surfaced in the shape of how far it was possible to maintain ideological purity in terms of non-recognition of the Revolution. Indeed, to the horror of Edmund Burke, negotiations were soon pursued by the Pitt government, in 1796 and 1797, only for the option to be closed by the French until terms were agreed in 1802 by the Tory ministry of Henry Addington.
Nevertheless, alongside the more complex issue of tactics, the Tories offered an ideological cohesion in their hostile response to Revolutionary France. However, unlike the Second World War, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars did not lead to large-scale post-war interventionism. Indeed, the difference between the situation in 1815 and 1945 helped direct contrasting post-war stances.
It would not be really appropriate to use the term “Splendid Isolation” for the period from 1815 to the Anglo-French entente of 1904, as there was a willingness to engage with other powers, for example in support of the Greek struggle for independence from Ottoman (Turkish) rule, and with the international coalition involved in the Crimean War (1854–56) as later in the First World War.
Yet, there was a Tory scepticism with Liberal engagement towards freedom, notably for High Tories, such as the Duke of Wellington. In other words, there were, as always, exogenous pressures and the related domestic perceptions and politics. These caused divisions within as well as between political movements.
The need for the containment of international disruption was outlined in 1858 in a circular from James, 3rd Earl of Malmesbury, the talented foreign secretary in the new Conservative government. He argued that as peace “cannot be disturbed in any quarter without the risk of the disturbance becoming more general”, Britain would therefore “always be ready, by her good offices, to contribute to moderating angry discussion, to avert hostile collisions, or to remove entanglements which may threaten to alienate nations from one another”.
At the same time, there was a political inclination toward caution that was seen in a deliberate strategic rebalancing away from the idea of a “Concert of Europe”. There was caution about the pressure on British resources, military, financial and economic, not least in the aftermath of debt-accelerating wars, particularly from 1763, 1783, 1815 and 1856.
There was also a particular response to specific circumstances and events at the time, especially the wish to avoid the commitments involved in alliances and guarantees. These commitments included domestically the costs, notably the burdens of taxation, the increase of debt, and curtailment of individual liberty, that conflict often begins.
Was there a ruling Euro-isolationist doctrine that collapsed and if so, when and why?
This caution was also in part a product of the Royal Navy’s interest in “Blue Water” primacy and the political acceptance of a leading navy but not of a large army. This was a political theme dear to Tories, notably in reaction to Oliver Cromwell, William III and others associated with such an army. This antipathy, however, was not an attitude that survived the world wars when, indeed, the Conservatives were close to the army and largely abandoned earlier navalist views.
When did the Conservatives change? Was there a ruling Euro-isolationist doctrine that collapsed and if so, when and why? Or was there, instead, largely a succession of responses by very different administrations to European (and sometimes European colonial) events, one that mostly (but not always) conformed to minimising Britain’s European engagement?
Whichever approach is taken, how best to place Disraeli’s central role in the Congress of Berlin (1878) and the 1904 entente with France? Furthermore, after the activism of 1918–20, notably in the Russian Civil War, and the stance of Austen Chamberlain as foreign secretary (1924–9), particularly the diplomacy underlying the Locarno Pact of 1925, there was a more cautious stance by the Conservative-dominated National Government, as in the support for the Hoare-Laval Pact of 1935, which was seen as a way to defuse the Italo-Ethiopian War.
From this perspective, it was Hitler that forced a change of direction by pushing Churchill to the fore. Neville Chamberlain had guaranteed Poland and Romania, but lacked the fervour of interventionism seen with Churchill (a Liberal from 1904 to 1924). His crossing the floor in 1904 was to a great extent a consequence of his belief in free trade and unwillingness to back Conservative protectionism.
He subsequently backed other international positions that scarcely matched prudence. This was particularly so during the Russian Civil War and in the Chanak Crisis of 1922 with Turkey. Each represented a serious failure of assessment concerning the international, military and domestic political contexts.
Both crises ended in what can be seen as appeasement but, more properly, compromise, and the bulk of Conservative MPs opposed the risk of war with Turkey, the crisis helping provoke their rejection of the coalition with the Lloyd George Liberals, despite that enjoying the support of the leadership.
Yet, modern conservatism’s direction of travel is set by an avoidance of prudence, and, indeed, a continuing rejection of the particular and popular instance of prudence at Munich in 1938.
Arguments can of course be made for or against sabre-rattling in particular modern crises, and for or against a more general attempt at a great-power role with the accompanying costs. What, however, is less convincing is an attempt to present recent and present-day interventionism as in accord with fundamental Tory principles.
Of course, to electioneer on the basis of prudence and conservatism would not readily accord with the modern assumption that parties ought to be able to promise improvement, nor with the tendency of parties to define themselves in terms of aspirations and policies presented in idealistic terms and a moralistic tone. The Conservatives, in their search since the mid-20th century for a politically usable past, have been captured by Whiggish progressivism and Liberal interventionism.
At the same time, this search reflects not only an ability to draw on varied aspects of the national past, notably in terms of the battle for survival, but also one made distinctive for the Conservatives by their emphasis on the nation state, rather than any kind of internationalism.
The emphasis has been on the politics of patriotism and nationalism, and these provide a convincing account of the idea of a national interest even if its implementation is scarcely free from debates about content.
