Back To The Future.(foreign-policy themes from Britain's imperial past)(Brief Article)

Amoral foreign policy? No other European prime minister would even think of it. Tony Blair's global diplomacy is quintessentially British, rooted in the 19th century, when Britain was a superpower and India was under its rule.

It is 1829 and Lord William Bentinck has just made a historic decision, outlawing a practice known as suttee, in which the widows of Brahmins immolate themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands. A barbaric custom, the future governor concluded, not worthy of the empire. The British also suppressed the thug-cult of the goddess Kali, whose devotees roamed the Subcontinent, strangling travelers they came across as a macabre act of worship. Significantly, neither edict had anything to do with religion, or converting locals to Christianity. "The primary object of my heart is the benefit of the Hindus," wrote Bentinck, high- mindedly. While 19th-century Britain was one of the most fervently Christian societies of its day, its foreign policy was founded on universal principles of human rights that, Britons felt, transcended the bounds of any one religion and applied to all people around the world.

So too for Tony Blair, visibly descended from this liberal tradition. As the man himself put it in a speech on Oct. 30, America and Britain are fighting "because we believe in our values of justice, tolerance and respect for all regardless of race, religion or creed." While Bentinck could hardly have said it better, the figure who looms largest in Britain's moral pantheon is William Ewart Gladstone, Britain's legendary Victorian prime minister--and one of Blair's avowed heroes.

After witnessing the treatment of political prisoners in Naples following the revolution of 1848, Gladstone wrote a fiery protest to the prime minister of the day. Notably, the British government subsequently distributed it to every ruler in Europe, a not-so-subtle reminder that here is a global code of conduct, even for sovereigns. A generation later Gladstone dropped another bombshell of a pamphlet on the "Bulgarian horrors," denouncing the massacres of thousands of Christian Slavs under the Turkish sultan and demanding that Britain change its traditional pro-Ottoman policy on grounds of grave abuses of human rights.

Humanitarian interventions for human rights and economic development based on free trade for the sake of the poor: if there are main themes in Blair's diplomacy, they are these, just as under Gladstone. Nearly two centuries ago they led Britain into what remains the longest and bloodiest but also perhaps the most beneficial humanitarian intervention in world history--Britain's suppression of the African slave trade.

Lest it be forgotten, slavery was abolished in Britain and its colonies in 1833. But because it still ...