Great Britain's European Policy since the Second World War

Abstract

purpose of this paper is to describe the of British towards Europe during the twelve years immediately following the second world war. I use the phrase of policy advisedly. A is something deliberate and conscious, but a is something more impersonal and even unintentional. Every policy-maker sees his as a single, clear-cut, consistent straight line; but in few sovereign states today, and certainly not in Great Britain, is dictated by one person, or even by one group of people seeing exactly eye to eye with each other. What historians see is therefore not a straight line, but at best a curve, or at worst a zig-zag. It is such a curve, to which the policy-makers' straight lines are no more than tangents, that I have in mind when I speak of the trend of Great Britain's European policy. No one chose or decided upon just this particular trend, though it was of course determined by deliberate choices and conscious decisions. And therefore probably no one, in or out of public life, would accept as his choice, or even his party's choice, exactly what I describe, for the sake of brevity, as having been or now being the of British towards Europe. Nevertheless I hope my description will not be such as to seem absurd to future historians, who will alone be in a position to judge definitively. I take Great Britain's European today to mean not, as up to 1939, the sum or resultant of her policies towards individual European countries, but her towards Europe as some kind of a collective entity or at least towards Western Europe as such. I disregard Eastern Europe (the Soviet bloc) except insofar as what happens behind the Iron Curtain affects British towards Western Europe. I also leave out of account local European problems of the kind that used to lead