Decline and the Politics of Retrenchment

Abstract

Post-1945 British foreign policy is typically thought to be characterized by a single linear trend of decline. Paul Kennedy summarizes this standard perspective when he states that after 1945, `step by step the British retreated — or rather stumbled — back to their island base, whence they had emerged some two or more centuries earlier to dominate a great part of the globe and its oceans.’1 According to this conventional view of postwar British foreign policy, economic decline has placed British leaders in a policy straitjacket which constrains policy choice and, in essence, dictates policy.2 In fact, the emphasis given to the country’s relative decline over the past 50 years is so prevalent that some even claim that decline is approaching the status of an overarching paradigm in the study of British foreign policy.3