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... I did so out of belief.' The quasi-religious fervour the Bush administration put into fulfilling such a vision could not suit Tony Blair better (Ignazi and Giacomello 2003, Kampfner 2003, Gray 2004, Schafr and Walker 2006, The Economist 2006a, Freedland 2007. ...
... On paper, Blair, the leader of the left-wing Labour Party, should not have got along well with the conservative businessman-turned-politician, Berlusconi, even allowing for their individual commitment to supporting the United States. Get along well they did; however, it might have been, as Gray (2004) argues, because Tony Blair was a 'neo-Thatcherite', and Silvio Berlusconi, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher himself, would not fail to see their differences and empathize with Blair. To stress discontinuity with the past, the second Berlusconi cabinet was characterized, from the outset, by a strong anti-EU attitude (Croci 2005, Romano 2006). ...
Governments are run by humans who have sympathies and moods. The study of leaders' personalities, albeit not widespread, is an important tool for foreign policy analysis. Plus, friendship is a feeling that decision-makers like to express for each other. This paper analyses the activity of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's three times premier, who has made ‘friendship’ a central tenet of his personal foreign policy. Three cases are considered, namely, Berlusconi's relationship with George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin. The paper concludes that his friendship-based foreign policy has somehow worked; but, because he decided to ignore Italy's structural constraints in the international arena, he ended up wasting opportunities and resources.
... New Labour has an ideologically multifaceted programme drawing on many different traditions, political and philosophical elements, emanating from a diverse range of philosophical and political traditions, namely conservatism, social democracy, socialism and liberalism (Driver and Martell 2002;Freeden 1999). This occurs because New Labour seeks to address complex dilemmas, contradictions, tensions, inherited regulatory-institutional arrangements, political processes and past traditions (Bevir 2000;Gray 2004). One such perspective is that of Hall (2003) with his suggestion that New Labour is "difficult to categorise", as it encompasses a hybrid regime combining neoliberal and social democratic tendencies (19). ...
In the UK there has been a proliferation of agencies at differing regulatory scales as part of the rescaling and restructuring of the state by New Labour, following the neoliberal policies of previous Conservative governments. This raises questions concerning the extent to which New Labour's urban state restructuring is embedded within neoliberalism, and the local tensions and contradictions arising from emergent New Labour urban state restructuring. This paper examines these questions through the analysis of key policy features of New Labour, and the in-depth exploration of two programmes that are reshaping urban governance arrangements, namely Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) and New Deal for Communities (NDC) programmes. We conclude that New Labour's restructuring is best understood in terms of the extended reproduction (roll-out) of neoliberalism. While these “new institutional fixes” are only weakly established and exhibit internal contradictions and tensions, these have not led to a broader contestation of neoliberalism.
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