Kmflett's Blog

The 75th anniversary of NATO was marked in 2024. Its worth keeping in mind that while there is a Labour tradition of support for Atlanticism and NATO, going back to the Attlee Government and including the 2024 Labour Government there has also been a left-wing tradition of opposition to it. That opposition is based perhaps primarily on the point that its existence makes war not less likely but more likely. It tries to define a Western perspective which as E P Thompson (Countermarching to Armageddon, New Left Review 1/4 July/August 1960) is exclusive not inclusive

There are two banners which I’m damned if we should let the Armageddon contingents carry off—“Europe”, and “the West”. Who gave them the right to speak in the name of a Europe from which Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Moscow and the majority of the French and Italian working-class have been exorcised? Or a “West” which has no place for the Western traditions of Marx and the Communards, Clydeside engineers and Hamburg dockers, Tom Mann and Jaurès, French maquis and Yugoslav partisans?

Of course since Thompson wrote these words 64 years ago NATO has expanded and ‘western’ now includes a good deal of ‘eastern’ Europe. His point about subsuming or ignoring genuine traditions of internationalism maintains