Italy's invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 prompted a major European crisis. This article applies the main theories of foreign policy analysis to the British Government's handling of this crisis. It argues that bureaucratic politics existed, but had little impact on outcomes. Domestic politics had more influence, but did not provide detailed instructions on how to act. The perceptions of key actors, informed by reasoned judgement, determined this. Fears of the threat posed by rival states coalesced with concerns about Britain's own military weakness, leading decision-makers to emphasise the need to act in tandem with France. British policy was therefore motivated by the tension between the public's desire to see action against Italy and the Government's wish to minimise any breach with her allies. These findings highlight the weaknesses of the bureaucratic politics model and show how domestic politics can affect foreign policy outcomes. They also demonstrate the interaction between rational analysis defined in terms of reasoned judgement, and actors' perceptions. It is thus argued that benefits are to be gleaned from combining these theories.

The career and reputation of James Ramsay MacDonald are generally influenced by his actions in 1931, and yet, as Donald Cameron Watt has stated, it is ‘not really possible to blackguard him for 1931 without having to cast aspersions on his extraordinary achievements earlier on’. This article examines some of these ‘extraordinary’ achievements by considering the role of MacDonald himself in the formation and leading of the 1924 minority Labour Government. It considers the difficulty he experienced in creating a Cabinet from colleagues whom he generally considered to be unsuitable and incapable, and which led him to become both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. He faced criticism from many in his party for his failure to implement a measure of socialist reforms, yet given the nature of the domestic problems with which his government was faced, and the tenuous nature of this government, held in place, as it was, by a fractured Liberal Party, this ‘failure’ is scarcely surprising. However, this article maintains that in foreign policy, and in his powerful joint role, MacDonald's reputation in 1924 really can be described as outstanding.

This article explores the account of international hospitality found in the natural law tradition from Vitoria to Kant. Rather than limit itself to intellectual history, the focus here is on a more enduring theme: the double-bind of hospitality which the natural lawyers encountered in seeking to find a place for the welcome of the foreigner in the ‘law of nations’. Although these thinkers agreed on a natural right of communication, this proved destabilising, even destructive, of the property claims by which hosts establish their domain as properly theirs in the first place. All struggled with this double-bind, though this took different forms, from the concern that the law of hospitality might thereby justify colonial appropriation to fears for how it could threaten sovereignty. Two thinkers arguably find a way out of the double-bind of right of communication-right of property in hospitality, but sacrifice the law of hospitality in the process: Pufendorf, subordinating communication to property, turns hospitality into charity and thereby effectively denies it status as a law of nature; Kant, putting communication first, makes hospitality a matter of right, not philanthropy, but also sees it as instrumental to the development of a global civil condition, where it would be redundant.