The Rebirth of “Muscular Liberalism”?
David Cameron first used the term “muscular liberalism” in an address to a Munich security conference in February 2011. “Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism,” he said. The speech was Cameron’s first major contribution as prime minister to debates surrounding radicalization and how the state should tackle religious extremism in Britain.
Ten months earlier, the Coalition launched the “Big Society” initiative. “You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society”, said David Cameron in Liverpool. For the Coalition, Big Society depended on the three pillars of social action, public service reform and community empowerment and represented “a whole new approach to government and governing”. Although a PR flop, the campaign was a bold attempt by the Coalition to give charities and communities a greater role in running some of the affairs of state. The Labour Party labelled the campaign “a cloak for the small state” and it quickly faded to become a small part of the Conservative Party’s “decontamination strategy” that came to dominate Cameron’s ten years as leader.
On the domestic stage, “muscular liberalism” has proven unsuccessful in capturing the public’s collective imagination about the potential for change. Setting aside legitimate normative arguments on the limits of state-intervention, the Coalition can at least be praised for its creativity, energy and willingness to try something new in establishing the Big Society. The great issues here were timing and execution. How could the same government celebrate the diversity of the 2012 Olympic Games, only to organise “Go Home” vans to be driven around communities with a high proportion of foreign-born residents one year later? In his Munich address, Cameron said, “under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream.” “Muscular liberalism”, “British values” and “Big Society” attempted to pull British people together by diffusing the tension between different value systems. But poor execution in the quality and consistency of government messaging across departments caused many citizens to consider themselves further marginalised and blamed by their government for broader socio-economic grievances.
“During David Cameron’s premiership, “muscular liberalism” was very much a doctrine rooted in Britain’s domestic policy agenda…But what if the doctrine is better suited to the UK’s foreign policy agenda in the 2020s?” — Tom Parkin
During David Cameron’s premiership, “muscular liberalism” was very much a doctrine rooted in Britain’s domestic policy agenda. The central question was how should power in the United Kingdom be restructured by Britons, for Britons and in the interests of Britain? But what if the doctrine is better suited to the UK’s foreign policy agenda in the 2020s? The growing confidence of non-democratic states in international affairs has caused a re-evaluation of major liberal alliances and institutions. Examples include President Biden’s 2021 virtual Summit for Democracy, the D-10 Strategy Forum, the AUKUS military pact and more recently, an increase in defence spending by European states following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As Anne Applebaum wrote, “for decades now, we’ve been fighting a culture war between liberal values on the one hand and muscular forms of patriotism on the other. The Ukrainians are showing us a way to have both.” At the time of the Big Society launch, European democracies faced ruin from within following the near collapse of the Eurozone area due to state fiscal mismanagement and rogue leaders in the financial sector. Today, the main adversaries of these democracies are rogue states actively seeking their demise. Images from Ukraine that make us weep can only encourage our citizens to passionately defend our system of government and consider it an essential component of our national security.
Apart from a number of desk flags, the Labour Party’s foreign policy platform under Keir Starmer has been woefully incoherent, indistinct and unmemorable. Lisa Nandy and David Lammy are both skilled and articulate politicians, but so far in this parliament, the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic and Labour’s new leadership operation has significantly reduced the public role of the Shadow Foreign Secretary. Since their promise to “Stop Brexit” in 2019, the Liberal Democrats have also struggled to repitch their foreign policy tent. For too many parties in too many elections, the foreign policy agenda is often pencilled in at the last minute and left unintegrated with the rest of the manifesto, or worse, unformed. Oil and gas price rises, the War in Ukraine, Covid international travel restrictions and the yet unsettled post-Brexit settlement have made core international issues, national again. The “muscular liberalism” of the Coalition years had its faults, but if reconstructed with care and sensitivity, its promise of a confident nation, willing and able to assert its Liberal standards and values on the international stage could gain public support and fill a gap on the policy field.
The wellbeing of those in and beyond Britain depends on it.
Tom Parkin is a political commentator and Tweets @tompjparkin. You can subscribe to his newsletter here.
