The Primacy of Foreign Policy? Britain in the Second World War

Abstract

Do we need a ‘primacy of foreign policy’ thesis in the study of Britain in and around the Second World War?1 It would seem that the importance of the ‘foreign’ in this period would be all too obvious. And yet, most historical writing on Britain in the Second World War has been dominated by an emphasis on the domestic and by an implicit domestic-primacy thesis. The domestic civilian aspects of war (the so-called ‘home front’) have a central place in the standard national narrative — they are seen as central to the rise of the welfare state, the great theme in the historiography of the development of state and nation. That war facilitated domestically generated progressive social change was at the core of the national and nationalistic social-democratic historiography of twentieth-century Britain. The work of conservative historians too was largely domestic, a telling case being that of Maurice Cowling. He wrote about the ‘impact of Hitler’ but not in the obvious foreign-primacy sense: his concern was with how domestic high politics made use of the existence of Hitler in domestic struggles.2 Just as striking is the literature on decline, from left and right, which was almost entirely focussed on the domestic. One can define the declinism that dominated comment on the British economy and much else besides as attempted explanations of British relative decline, which was very largely caused by the growth of other countries, by alleged domestic failures.3