National Identity and British Foreign Policy

Srdjan Vucetic

Paper* prepared for the 2020 Britain and the World

Conference, University of Plymouth, 17‐ 19 June 2020**
Abstract: Britain’s tenaciously global foreign policy after 1945 was never simply a function of
the nation’s ruling class acting on the basis of elite obsessions or after some sort of bipartisan
consensus. Rather, this policy developed from mainstream, gradually evolving ideas about “us,”
“them,” and “Others” generated within a broader British and, more specifically, English society.

* Introduction of a book ms. (the rest available upon request)

** Due to COVID‐19, the conference is now scheduled to take place in 2021

Srdjan Vucetic is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs,
University of Ottawa. He is the author of The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity
in International Relations (Stanford 2011) and co‐editor of Canadian Defence Policy in Theory
and Practice (Palgrave 2020). His work has also appeared in journals such as European Journal
of International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Organization and The British
Journal of Politics and International Relations. Contact: https://srdjanvucetic.wordpress.com/

1
Introduction

“At the very point of junction.” “At the top table.” “Punching above our weight.” “Pivotal

power.” “Significant global power.” “Global hub.” “Global Britain.” “Major global player.”

“Great global player.” “True global player.” These are some of the official and officious

designations of British foreign policy in the post-Second World War period. Dreamed up by

policy-makers and commentators of different eras, party politics, and ideologies to describe and

proscribe the ambitions of the United Kingdom (UK) in the world, these phrases also index a

long-standing policy “problem”: how to pursue a robust global power policy in the face of

relative decline, meaning the visible erosion of the state’s international position.

But so elusive were the solutions that this became a problem to be managed, not solved,

as in an oft-repeated saw: “In the 1950s we in Britain managed decline; in the 1960s we

mismanaged decline; and in the 1970s we declined to manage” (Brown 2004). The problem

persists into the twenty-first century. “We still struggle to adjust to our reality,” declared the

Guardian in a hard-hitting 25 January 2010 editorial: “The UK’s World Role: Great Britain’s

Greatness Fixation,” which argued that an exceptionalist desire to be “the leading nation, not just

one of them,” was bipartisan and thus hard to eradicate. “But this way hubris lies.” The warning

came at a time when the then Conservative-led government embarked on “austerity” –

supposedly an effort to “prune” state spending in response to the global financial crisis of 2008,

but in fact yet another iteration of “neoliberalization.” Then, in the midst of this and many other

destabilizing events and processes around the world, came “Brexit,” the UK’s much-bungled,

and still ongoing, exit from the European Union (EU). A new round of sneers and taunts came in.

“There are two kinds of European nations,” said one continental politician in 2017: “There are

2
small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.” Brexit,

said another, is “the real end of the British Empire.”1

Although crude and rude, such statements contain an element of truth. Yes, the UK

remains the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world, a top trading nation, a top cultural power,

and a top military power – one fielding both nuclear weapons and a functional blue-water navy –

with a permanent seat on the United Nations (UN) Security Council. Yet, rather than reasserting

its “confident role” as a “global power,” as per the Conservative “Brexiter” lexicon circa 2018,2

the UK is also facing major constraints on economic growth, government borrowing, diplomatic

influence, and national unity. The ongoing global pandemic of the disease caused by the novel

coronavirus COVID-19 exacerbates this predicament by orders of magnitude, not least because

of the incompetent, even callous initial response of the government of Boris Johnson.

Britain’s global power role fixation is a puzzle that has fascinated not only generations of

scholars, historians above all (Darwin 2009, 13–17), but also political geographers (Taylor 2016

[1990], xi) and sociologists (Go 2011, 21–2). In this book, I approach it from the standpoint of

international relations (IR) theory (McCourt 2014a, 3–6; see also Hill 2018; Freedman and

Clarke 1991). I begin my theorizing with the basic constructivist notion that national identity

informs and shapes the matrices of legitimate foreign policy. I then proceed to interpret a

selection of events that are at the centre of both British policies and international politics in the

post-Second World War period. Britain’s bid to “be everywhere, do everything,” I argue, was

never simply a function of the ruling elite’s obsessions; rather, it emerged from British and

(mostly) English society as a whole and, more specifically, from the deep-rooted, routine, and

(mostly) unreflective discourses through which “Britain” became a presence in the everyday

lives of its citizens, elites and masses alike. To again put it rudely and crudely: whatever the

3
circumstances of the kingdom’s relative decline, “the British” configured themselves as a special

edition of humankind. And therein lies a key reason that leaders advocating for foreign policy

retrenchment could only question the mechanisms of global power projection, not global power

projection as such.

The Third Superpower

In 1943, when American IR scholar William T.R. Fox coined the term “superpower” to describe

states able to wield significant and exceptionally mobile military power independently from

other states, he emphatically had the UK in mind as well. This, he later explained, was an error,

albeit one that many of his peers committed that decade (Fox 1980, 417, 420).

This should not be all that surprising. Emerging victorious from the most widespread and

deadliest conflict in history, Britain held to an empire so vast and so complex that John Darwin

(1991) rightly calls it “a British system of world power.” Even after India and four more Asian

colonies gained independence between 1947 and 1948 – “an unavoidable and unique

development that demanded compensation elsewhere” (Harrison 2009, 7–8) – the British Empire

was still the world’s largest and easily the preeminent power in Africa, the Middle East, the

Mediterranean, and, thanks to the giant British Army of the Rhine, in Western Europe. Countless

places in the Asia-Pacific and the Caribbean flew the Union Jack, too; some of them, like Kure

in Japan, for the very first time (Perkins 2003).

Thanks to the multifaceted nature of imperial power, “decolonization” in fact enabled

redeployment and redistribution of metropolitan influence – a phenomenon variously dubbed

“neo-colonization,” “empire by other means,” “second colonial occupation,” or “the Third

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British Empire.”3 As detailed by Sarah Stockwell (2018), for instance, assorted “development”

programs provided thousands of British officials with well-paying jobs overseas well into the

post-empire era.

Britain’s high international status was recognized not only by the “old” and “new”

Commonwealths – the old refers to the ex-colonies of white settlement where the British Crown

and British power enjoyed most respect – but also by the other fifty or so states and empires,

including, crucially, the two superpowers. An eloquent testimony to this fact is the Potsdam

Conference of 1945, where UK prime ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee sat at the

“Big Three” table with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and United States (US) president Harry

Truman. The same goes for Soviet calls, in the winter of 1946–47, for an Anglo-Soviet

condominium that would divide Europe into two.4 Others admired Britain precisely for rejecting

such overtures.

Ample recognition also came in the international institutional context. British diplomats

made an outsized contribution to the establishment of the Bretton Woods system and the United

Nations. They would have also helped build the European Coal and Steel Community had the

UK government chosen to join it like it joined the Brussels Pact and the Organization for

European Economic Co-operation in 1948 or the Council of Europe and the North Atlantic

Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 (Barker 1983, 112–20; Adamthwaite 1985; Blackwell

1993).

Next, the UK controlled almost a third of Western Europe’s industrial output and almost

a quarter of the world’s manufacturing exports. British leadership in science and technology was

even more formidable, as David Edgerton (2005, 2018b) has shown: just look at per-capita

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numbers of scientists, engineers, and Nobel prizes or at the UK’s accomplishments in jet aviation

– the world’s first jet-liner, for example – or in nuclear research and development, including the

swift progress to the first atomic bomb test in 1952.

Last but not least, the world’s financial arrangements were mostly made in the city of

London (Strange 1971; Schenk 2010; Cain and Hopkins 2016; Fichtner 2017; Green 2020).

Related, nearly half of the world’s trade was denominated in pound sterling, which, despite its

problems, still counted as a credible “master currency” and therefore as a “prestige symbol of the

first order” (Dobson 1995, 164; see also Shonfield 1958, 103–4). Put all these facts together, and

you, too, might see the Britain of the late 1940s as one of the Big Three, a nation that was, “as

never before, trying to act as a superpower” (Reynolds 2000, 2).

The key word, of course, is “trying,” for that same Britain had larger debts than any other

nation in history. Worse, this was only a symptom of a structural weakness that the war and the

coming superpower era laid bare: “It was unlikely that a nation with only two percent of the

world’s population could control over a fifth of its land surface, maintain half of its warships and

account for 40 per cent of its trade in manufactured goods for very long” (Reynolds 2000, 33).

Once the fabled hegemon of hegemons – in IR theory, hegemony refers to leadership of an

international order – the British Empire was now inexorably contracting, however savvy the

optics management of the Empire-to-Commonwealth transition at the time.

In materialist, objectivist IR, a great power is said to be in decline when it sheds

capabilities, especially economic capabilities, relative to other great powers for at least five

consecutive years. From this perspective, a “Brexit” from the top-tier league occurred sometime

before the mid-1950s.5 In contrast, above all, British “declinologists” tend to view decline as a

6
relational and intersubjective reality – a set of interpretations and meanings that actors invent to

make sense of the objective world.6 Building on the latter ontology, I propose to trace Britain’s

decline and declinism via discourses of British identity, a.k.a. “Britishness” – structured practices

of communication on how “we” understand “us,” “them,” and “Others.” In a treasury

memorandum penned for the new Labour government on 13 August 1945, John Maynard

Keynes voiced his concerns about the risk of bankruptcy or, as he described it, “a financial

Dunkirk.” If this came to pass, Britain would have to come home right away: “Abroad it would

require a sudden and humiliating withdrawal from our onerous responsibilities with great loss of

prestige and an acceptance for the time being of the position of a second-class Power, rather like

the present position of France” (Keynes 1945).

Fretting over “loss of prestige” vis-à-vis “them,” the US and Soviet superpowers, and

“Others,” such as France, was indeed commonplace in Whitehall after the war. In the end, Her

Majesty’s Treasury managed to survive – in large part thanks to a steady influx of US dollars,

including those associated with Marshall Plan aid. But so did the kingdom’s claim to global

power. In 1946–47, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Office, and chiefs of staff

famously defeated Attlee’s proposals for reducing Britain’s commitment-capability gaps (Bew

2016, 421–4). The prime minister was not arguing for a wholescale abandonment of the great

power status that his Victorian and Edwardian predecessors had practised so well but, rather, for

a withdrawal from the Middle East. Yet his opponents would have none of it, likening the

proposed policy to “Munich,” “the abdication of our position as a world power” (Darwin 2009,

536), and a transformation of Britain into “another Belgium” (Louis 2006, 23).

Hyperbolic comparisons with Belgium – “a country invented by the English to annoy the

French,” as an old jibe goes – were not new to identity discourses of Britain’s ruling class even

7
then. In 1908, then ex-viceroy of India Lord Curzon saw England sinking from the position of

“the arbiter” to that of “a sort of glorified Belgium” (Danchev 1998, 164). What is puzzling is

that this trope never went out of fashion – not after 1945, not after 1956, not after 1973, not after

1990, not after Brexit. “Not just another Belgium” was in fact akin to a strategy.

Just Another?!

Let us start with the so-called postwar, a.k.a. Bevinite, consensus.7 Ernest Bevin certainly

deserves to have his name immortalized in this way for he ensured that Labour stayed the course

on foreign policy. “Russia is Socialist, we are partly Socialist, America may believe in private

enterprise. The great task of Great Britain is to weld these forces together to keep the peace,” he

declared at the 1946 Labour Party conference, pandering to the party’s left wing (Schneer 1984,

204). The following year at the International Trade Organization negotiations in Geneva, he

painted a similar picture for the American diplomats as well. Rather than “just another European

country,” Bevin argued, Britain was an imperial power that “could make a contribution to

European recovery second only to that of the United States” (Hogan 1987, 46–9). None of this

was cheap talk for behind these pronouncements there actually was a plan he called a “Third

Force” – an all-but-Churchillian vision of Britain as the leader of a global bloc made up of the

Empire and Western Europe, including France and its colonies.8

The Bevinite consensus had other country referents. A decade after the Attlee-Bevin

debate, Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan told a US diplomat that “Britain would

become another Netherlands” if it failed to confront Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser

8
over the Suez Canal (quoted in McCourt 2014a, 70). Shortly afterwards he gave his first

broadcast as prime minister:

<Q>Every now and again since the war I have heard people say: “Isn’t Britain only a

second or third-class power now? Isn’t it on the way out?” What nonsense! In my

lifetime I have heard the same old tale about our being a second rate power, and I have

lived to see the answer ... Britain has been great, is great and will stay great, provided we

close our ranks and get on with the job. (Quoted in Wallace 1970, 207–8)<Q>

“Getting on with the job” spectacularly backfired in this case, yet Macmillan kept countering any

talk of decline – first in the context of his “Winds of Change” shift towards Africa, then even

more strongly vis-à-vis the European Economic Community (EEC), a.k.a. the Common Market:

“Would entry confirm the image of Britain as merely another European state, no longer capable

of playing a major role upon the larger stage of world politics?” (Sprout and Sprout 1963, 680,

emphasis in original).

Similar questions abounded in many subsequent affairs, from Harold Wilson’s

devaluation of the pound and withdrawal from “East of Suez” – are we not “a sort of poor man’s

Sweden” now? (Mangold 2001, 120) – to the run-up to the Falklands War under Margaret

Thatcher. Next came her famous Bruges Speech of 1988, in which she railed against “a

European superstate,” and after which some Eurosceptics began to refer to the EEC as

“Belgium.”

Fast forward through the end of the Cold War to Tony Blair’s back to East of Suez era

and we see yet more continuity. In the same year that the aforementioned Guardian editorial

declared that “our national interest should be to play our important role as a true, trusted and

9
committed European partner on the world stage,” Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the man who served as

both foreign secretary and defence secretary in the 1990s, wrote this: “The question for the UK

and its Conservative led Government is whether it wishes to retain a global approach, or resign

itself to the lesser status. Is it still prepared to act like France, or is it content to have influence

comparable with that of Spain?” (Rifkind 2010). The question was once again rhetorical: no

party or faction advocated a reduction in foreign policy ambitions to “the level of a Spain”

(Christopher Hill, quoted in Gaskarth 2013, 126). In fact, if we are to judge from the interwar

musings of figures such as Oswald Mosley, the longevity of “Spain” is second only to “Belgium”

(Rubin 2010, 345–7).

Scratch any number of imperial-era shifts in Britain’s geostrategic position – 1938, 1922,

1914, even 1873 – and you will no doubt find plenty of evidence of Britain’s leaders obsessing

about their country’s greatness. Conversely, review discourses UK prime ministers left behind

and you will find but two prime ministers who came close to entertaining the idea of abandoning

pretensions to global leadership: Edward Heath, a Tory prime minister from 1970 to 1974 best

known for his working-class origins, idiosyncratic views, and declaring a record five states of

emergency, and Harry Perkins, the fictional protagonist of A Very British Coup, a 1982 novel by

Labour left politician Chris Mullin.9

The Brexit era follows the same trend. “The feeling that Britain is not just another

country and can never be ‘another Switzerland,’” explains a British foreign policy textbook

published in 2017, is still a constant (Sanders and Houghton 2017, 7). In 2018, Lord Richards,

former chief of defence staff, spoke about a risk of the UK becoming “militarily and strategically

insignificant” (Lester 2018) – or, in the words of Conservative backbencher Tony Baldry uttered

earlier, a “Belgium with nukes” (McCourt 2014b, 165). (Baldry coined the phrase in 2010 in

10
reaction to the National Security Strategy and the Strategic Defence and Security Review, the

twin cost-cutting exercise that prompted the reaction from Rifkind quoted above.) At the risk of

exaggeration, but with an eye on the rhetoric of the cabinet of the current prime minister, Boris

Johnson, I would venture so far as to say that “Belgium” might continue to constitutionalize the

British sense of exceptionalism even in a fragmented UK – that is, in a hypothetical future

situation in which Scottish independence (and/or Irish unification) radically transforms the

polity’s constitutional settlement (and its military power).

Select comparisons with France, a fellow European major power likewise bursting with

exceptionalism, uncover further foreign policy puzzles. Much like their UK counterparts after the

war, authorities in the Élysée and the Quai d’Orsay sought to manage a crumbling empire while

pursuing world power – a fact aptly illustrated by the Anglo-French invasion of Suez, for

instance. Yet “Western unity” and “Cold War neutrality” meant different things in London and

Paris, respectively. A decade after Suez, for example, French president Charles de Gaulle moved

to first denounce Bretton Woods and call for a “return to gold” and then detach French forces

from NATO’s integrated command. Why was this never an option in London? Simply put,

British and French decision makers made different decisions when faced with similar structural

pressures, whether in relation to debt, to decolonization, or to the US-Soviet face-off.10

Britain’s zigzags vis-à-vis “Europe” are part of the same puzzle. As the British world-

system all but disintegrated by the 1960s, entry into the Common Market became a new strategic

goal – or rather, as most British leaders believed at the time, a new means for pursuing the old

goal. This U-turn was never completed. Rather than championing or co-championing European

federalism like their counterparts in Paris, UK governments remained committed to a “limited

liability” policy, thus reinforcing a membership status that scholars have called “reluctant,”

11
“awkward,” “aloof,” “semi‐detached,” and “on the sidelines” (for overviews, see Daddow 2004;

Ellison 2007; and Smith 2017). Moreover, as Christopher Hill (2019, 28, 34–5) observes, UK

officials and politicians routinely underestimated the Europeans, based on an erroneous belief

that the UK could always either exploit Franco-German tensions or be warmly welcomed as a

tertium quid of the European project.

Contrast all this with the “reverential” attitudes towards the Anglo-American (a.k.a. UK-

US) “special relationship” – a term some have argued is an Orwellian euphemism for a plot

designed to turn Britain into America’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”11 Considering just how

ruthlessly the US exploited the power asymmetry in this relationship, this view is not necessarily

wrong. Recall, for example, that it was President Truman who, weeks after the Potsdam

Conference, moved to terminate lend-lease aid, thus sparking the very first of the three major

sterling crises that rocked the country before 1951. And yet, the special relationship carried on,

with UK governments usually acting not as Greeks to America’s Romans, as Macmillan

famously wished it, but as “the warrior satellite” (Barnett 1972, 592): a spear-carrying Sidon to

America’s Carthage (Danchev 1998, 161).

Surely some UK politicians questioned these foreign policy parameters at some point?

Some did. Far on the political right we have Enoch Powell, the man best known for white

supremacist speechifying in the 1960s. As Camilla Schofield (2013) details, his other obsession

at that time was what he called a “non-Commonwealth policy.” Britain’s overseas commitments,

he wrote in the Times of 1 April 1964, “combine the maximum chance of involvement,

embarrassment, expense, and humiliation, with the maximum effect” (quoted in Schofield 2013,

173).12

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 On the other side of the spectrum we have Labour left figures such as the long-forgotten

Fenner Brockway, Konni Zilliacus, and C.A.R. Crosland, or the semi-forgotten early Robin

Cook, the iconic Tony Benn, and Jeremy Corbyn, the party’s Brexit-era leader. These politicians

distinguished themselves as “mavericks” for many reasons, one of which was their willingness to

imagine alternative foreign policy sensibilities for the country. In this, they occasionally found

common ground with hardcore communists and members of the far-left Socialist Workers’ Party,

not to mention supporters of the New Left and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Yet even

as they contemplated politics beyond the interests of the British state, neutrality, or pro-gender

norms in foreign policy, most if not all of these “radical” leftists themselves struggled to imagine

their country as just another Sweden. Instead, as Jodi Burkett (2013) has shown, they made

claims of moral exceptionalism and exemplarity much as did liberals and conservatives.13 One of

the most striking statements of this sensibility was made in 1948 and comes from none other than

Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, the human engine behind the National Health Service (NHS): “The eyes

of the world are turning to Great Britain. We now have the moral leadership of the world, and

before many years are over we shall have people coming here as to a modern Mecca, learning

from us in the twentieth century as they learned from us in the seventeenth century.14” Bevan

remained convinced of British greatness even after the Suez fiasco: “this county is a depository

of probably more concentrated experience and skill than any other in the world” (Harrison 2009,

96, 543–4).

The fact there seem to be only a few, if any, ready examples of UK politicians accepting

their country even as merely distinctive rather than as self-evidently unique and superior compels

us to ponder the role of a ruling elite harbouring “delusions of grandeur” (Shonfield 1958, 97;

see also, inter alia, Barnett 1972; Marcussen et al 1999; Haseler 2007, 2012; O’Toole 2019).

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This hypothesis has gone through a number of memorable articulations over the years. In a book

published right after the victory in the Falklands, Anthony Verrier (1983, 321) pathologized the

kingdom’s foreign policy orientation with reference to the Alice in Wonderland syndrome, a

perceptual disorder of the size of the patient’s own body or its position in space that one English

psychiatrist identified in 1955. And, in 1998, Alex Danchev (1998, 164) revisited Curzon’s 1908

prophecy thus: “Britain is Belgium, though the British do not know it yet.”

Analyses that connect the nature and causes of the formal foreign policy action of post-

1945 UK governments to delusional or illusory frames of references circulating in the

Westminster, Whitehall, Fleet Street, and city corridors of power come in many forms. One

could, for instance, accept that elite actors were to various degrees delusional, or at least illusion-

prone, and then proceed to argue that they managed the country’s relative decline relatively well,

including in foreign policy, or perhaps especially in foreign policy.15 One could also contend that

the UK’s illusion of power was only a second-order effect of assorted postwar and post-imperial

adjustments made to meet the needs of finance and commerce – that is, of the owners of capital

and property.16

Such nuanced approaches are vital but I think still incomplete. My argument here is that

Britain’s search for global leadership was always an expression not so much of bipartisan

consensus, ruling-class interests, elite culture, or the “official mind” but of everyday self-

understandings circulating in British society as a whole.17 Most important among those was

British, and specifically English, exceptionalism – the idea that “we” are not just another part of

Europe but are different from, and superior to, it: a kingdom so great that it must look out to a

wider world. For all the complexity, heterogeneity, and contestation of meanings that twentieth

century Britons attached to their nation, this sense of greatness remained ever-present, even if

14
only tacitly – sort of the like prefix “Great” in “Great Britain.” Greatness, in other words, was

akin to a totem pole, the product of a vertically shared, deep-seated agreement between assorted

elites and sub-elites, on the one hand, and the broader mass consumer public, on the other.

My aim in this book is simple. I want to provide a theoretically and methodologically

grounded argument about the relationship between national identity and foreign policy against a

backdrop of political, social, and cultural transformations in postwar, post-imperial British

society and beyond. In so doing, I make an effort to build upon the insights of other scholars who

have grappled with these themes and to redirect scholarly attention to an area I regard as fruitful

for further research.

Do Anglo-Saxons Have All the Best Tunes?

Historically, IR scholars have tended to view states’ foreign policies as a function of rational

calculus based on objective self-interests. Some focused on the interests of national leaders

powerful enough to bend the arch of history to their will. Others started with the interest of

domestic and transnational groups and coalitions. Yet others foregrounded national interest as

conditioned by systemic constraints and opportunities, such as the regional and international

distributions of material power existing in objective reality. Beginning in the 1990s, however, the

concept of self-interest has given considerable way to identity and nearby “constructivist

concepts.” The preface of Losing an Empire, Finding a Role, a British foreign policy textbook,

indexes this change. In the first edition, published in 1990, David Sanders privileged “economic

interests and realist balances of power”; in the second edition, published in 2017, Sanders teamed

up with David Patrick Houghton to explain “complexity” and “new developments,” including

15
“new developments in IR theory”: “The debate about EU membership which raged in 2016 in

the run-up to the referendum illustrated the importance of national identity, domestic politics,

and psychological perceptions of reality, not simply objective interests (however defined).”18

There is much to be said about the importance of each of these factors – variables, if you

prefer – in the making and shaping of British foreign policy. In the same year that Losing an

Empire, Finding a Role first appeared, William Wallace gave a speech at the Royal Institute of

International Affairs, now better known as Chatham House, subsequently published in the

institute’s flagship journal, in which he, too, reflected on State Secretary Dean Acheson’s famous

quip. Wallace, then the institute’s director of studies, agreed that Britain needed to define a new

role for itself, particularly now that the Cold War was over, suggesting in the end that being “a

link between Europe and the rest of the developed world” would do the trick. The problem,

however, was that this new role was incommensurate with the prevailing “national identity” –

that is, with “concepts of our position in the world, from which flow presuppositions about

which other nations are our natural allies or enemies, which share our values and which do not.”

Regardless of the crisis du jour and whatever the party in power, Wallace observed, Britain’s

policy and political elite appeared to be divided between “Anglo-Saxon” and “European”

identities and identifications, but with the former having “all the best tunes.” Acting as a bridge

between Europe and the rest of the (developed) world was a good idea, but it did not come

naturally to the British, he argued, because of, among other things, “the myth of English

exceptionalism – a free country confronting an unfree European continent.”19

Wallace, who would later go on to become Liberal Democrat peer Lord Wallace of

Saltaire, was certainly not the only elite voice calling for a reorientation towards a European

identity in the 1990s (Gaskarth 2014, 52). More important, his original analysis and subsequent

16
publications on the same theme appear to have stood the test of time. At the time of this writing,

Anglo-Saxons are Brexite(e)rs who cheer the nation’s departure from the EU as the beginning of

the great new phase in British engagement with what Churchill called the open sea.20 Europeans,

then, encompass “Remoaners” (“Bremoaners”), who fret about an isolated and irresolute Britain,

buffeted by geopolitical forces beyond its control.

More important, Wallace’s article presages the rise of constructivist and interpretivist

developments in IR theory.21 Like, for example, Roxanne Lynn Doty’s (1996b) analysis of the

construction of British sovereignty after empire published a few years later, Wallace’s analysis

eschews a static view of “Britain.” Both authors similarly approach Britishness as a compound

identity, meaning one containing not only multiple subselves – that of the British-Irish state as a

single unit plus those of its constituent regions, with their particular national contents and

contestations in tow – but also empire (Doty 1996b, 130) and/or its transnational afterlife

(Wallace 1991, 70). Finally, both authors advocate a discursive approach. We cannot understand

the evolving relationship between Englishness and Britishness, Wallace (1991, 79n38) suggests,

without paying close attention to “coded phrases [that] carry depths of conscious and

unconscious meaning.”22

“Unconscious meaning” brings us to Contemporary Cultural Studies and Everyday

Nationalism, two large and interdisciplinary literatures spurred by critical interrogations of

modern British society by, respectively, Stuart Hall and Michael Billig. There, analysis begins

with concepts such as Antonio Gramsci’s senso comune, Raymond Williams’s “structure of

feeling,” and Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus and doxa – all social-theoretic reminders of the simple

fact that most people carry out their social lives by following the assemblage of truisms accepted

within a particular society.23 From these perspectives, “Britain” is not an aggregate of citizens

17
who share common values or a common culture so much as a social and political construct that is

performed, often unselfconsciously and unreflexively, through quotidian goings on.

For Hall (1981), who builds on Gramsci, hegemony is a system of rule that operates in

and through the universalization and internalization of particular beliefs linked to particular

social forces.24 So, to understand nationalism, racism, or related hegemonies, we must regard

elites and masses as co-producers of this system, without the former simply manipulating the

latter and without people being aware of their nationalism or racism.25 And national identity is

constructed specifically through the stories which are told about “the nation” (Hall 1996b, 613).

Billig (1995) and other scholars of everyday nationalism are also focused on things

people say, especially pronouns, demonstratives, locatives, possessive adjectives, adverbs, and

tense, that point to the time, place, or situation in which a speaker is speaking. “Our confident

role as a global power.” “This empire was liberal.” “They play by different rules.”26 Known as

deixis in linguistics, these “small words” – Wallace’s “coded phrases” – speak volumes about the

banality of nationalism, which means that they are precisely the type of “coded phrases” that

Wallace suggested contain key information about Britishness.

Consider Wallace’s (1991, 78) view of the relationship between identity and foreign

policy: “States cannot survive without a sense of identity, an image of what marks their

government and their citizens from their neighbors, of what special contribution they have to

make to civilization and international order. Foreign policy is partly a reflection of that search for

identity.” This evokes late 1980s poststructuralist IR: state identity is not a “thing” and not

simply “there” but, rather, constantly evolving or “becoming,” including in and through foreign

policy. We also see parallels with ontological security theory (OST), which is of more recent

18
vintage in IR.27 Why seek Brexit at all costs? Why gamble with a referendum on EU

membership in the first place, even after securing so many “opt-outs” on key parts of EU

legislation? Why commit to a four-boat “Trident” missile fleet and/or to continuous at-sea

deterrence? Why invest in two aircraft “super-carriers,” while the Royal Navy has but seventy-

five commissioned ships left in total and also while training across all three branches of the

armed forces is being mercilessly cut? Why tolerate such a one-sided partnership with the US –

including with respect to the technology and facilities that enable the operational capabilities of

not only Trident but also your biggest ships and the finest aircraft? Or, looking back to the

twentieth century, why fight tooth and nail to protect sterling as the master currency and the

antiquated system of imperial preference? Why support decolonization and then keep troops

deployed east of Suez, halfway around the world from the home base? In purely materialist,

objectivist terms, all of these policies – policies that Labour and Conservative parties largely

shared or still share – might appear exceedingly costly and even illogical. Not so from the

perspective of ontological security, or confidence in knowing who you are when going on in the

world. Analyzing why the retrenchment from Asia took so long, Phillip Darby, writing in 1973,

made a pointed observation: “the protection of India was part of an ingrained pattern of thought.

It was above politics” (quoted in Self 2010, 166; see also Rees 2001, 38). If state survival is a

function of predictability and order in an otherwise unpredictable world, then we should not be

surprised to see the UK craving routines and relationships that feed its appetite for self-

importance even to the point of compromising its own material, physical security.

Significant complementarities exist with Ted Hopf’s (2002; Hopf 2013) “societal

constructivism” as well. Foreign policy decision makers, Hopf argues, draw on national identity

categories – classifications attached to the nation and members of the nation – to construct

19
meanings, constitute action, coordinate their activities, and make claims in political life. While

such practices are strategic, positional, fragmented, and deeply contextual, they also tend to be

situated in particular discursive formations, or discourses, through which people articulate their

experience of living in, and belonging to, nations. Written, spoken, or “simply” performed,

discourses are shot through with power: Some are hegemonic or dominant, others subaltern or

marginalized. To illustrate with Wallace’s stylization, in 1990 the “Anglo-Saxon” discourse

appeared to be deeply embedded in the media and education, whereas the “European” discourse

circulated mainly among the elite. It follows that discourse analysis of Britishness at the level of

society could go a long way in helping us outline the temporal, spatial, and ethical parameters

within which British state action occurs (Hansen 2006, 40–5; see also Gaskarth 2011; 2013,

chap. 4; Berenskoetter 2014, 264–6). Those working in the tradition of the “traditions and

dilemmas” approach of Bevir and Rhodes (2003) would almost certainly agree (Daddow 2015,

73; also see Hall 2012; Bevir and Daddow 2015; Bevir, Daddow and Hall 2013; Bevir, Daddow,

and Schnapper 2015).

An extensive literature has indeed emerged since the publication of Wallace’s article that

can help us examine the role national identity plays in shaping foreign policy choices. The wager

I make building on this literature is that discursive fit can help us grasp the political dynamic

between national identity contestation on the one hand and foreign policy on the other. Also

known as resonance, match, or congruence, the concept of discursive fit is associated with

multiple disciplinary and social-theoretic traditions (inter alia, see Vucetic 2011b, 12–13;

Vucetic 2016b, 210–12; Holland 2013, 53–5; 2020, 69–73; Bevir and Daddow 2015, 279;

Daddow 2015b, 76; Colley 2019, 2). In social psychology-inspired theories of identity

management, for example, ruling elites succeed in reframing national identities as a way of

20
achieving a more positive social evaluation only if their cues fit with the prevailing attitudes,

opinion, and feelings of the public (Ward 2019). Likewise, in securitization theory, the framing

of issues or events as security or existential threats depends, in part, on the willingness and

ability of the target audience to accept the claim that its reality has changed such that

extraordinary or emergency measures may be implemented (Croft 2012). And virtually all neo-

Gramscians approaches would say that hegemony, although plural, complex, and fluid, is

ultimately bounded by some sort of goodness of fit between the material structure and the

predominant mental superstructure (Hall 1996a).

British foreign policy scholars have thought about discursive fit or similar concepts

before. For example, writing with Christopher Tugendhat in 1988, Wallace draws our attention

to “domestic acceptability,” which they define as a constraint on British foreign policy-makers

(Tugendhat and Wallace 1988, 101). Writing ten years later, Beatrice Heuser (1998, 5) argues

that the emphasis on “independence” and “alliance solidarity” in British nuclear deterrence

strategy persisted because it resonated with prevailing “collective mentalities” – and with more

generally held British beliefs, images, allusions, and commonly held points of reference.

Identity-based explanations of British foreign policy rely more explicitly on discursive fit

than do other explanations. In Amelia Hadfield-Amkhan’s (2010, 204) nominally neoclassical

realist account, national identity appears as “a political and cultural mechanism that obtains in

foreign policy at moments of crisis.”28 The reason the pound-versus-euro debate of 2003, to use

one of her case studies, was never much of a debate, she contends, had to do with the utter misfit

between the new monetary structure and the prevailing national identity in Britain at the time –

namely, a self-referential, particularist, and conservative “ethos of Englishness” (185; on the

essential Englishness of British foreign policy identity, see also Doty 1996b).

21
 The same argument might be extended to “England’s Brexit” (Barnett 2017, chap. 10) –

that is, to the failure of the pro-EU stance of the UK’s official and unofficial mind to prevail over

what many scholars argue were deeply rooted, and primarily English, objections to “loss of

sovereignty.”29 Accordingly, one good reason Remain lost the 2016 referendum and the general

election of 2019 lies in the pervasiveness of the belief in the idea of British exceptionalism

among voters concentrated in “England without London” and parts of English-speaking Wales.

Questions of Britishness, as Oliver Daddow and James Gaskarth remind us, have always

kept UK leaders awake at night: “does the course of action fit in with Britain’s view of itself and

how it wishes to be seen by other actors in world politics? Would the British people support and

identify with the policy? Which communities that Britain belongs to are affected by the issue at

hand?” (Daddow and Gaskarth 2011, 17; see also Bevir and Daddow 2015, 274–5; Gaskarth

2013, 61). The authors’ own interpretations of foreign policy-making under New Labour

demonstrate this empirically (Gaskarth 2011; Daddow 2011), as do, for example, Jack Holland’s

(2013) analysis of Blair’s rhetoric and the “War on Terror,” and Nick Whittaker’s (2017)

examination of the “island race” trope in the context of the UK’s struggles with globalization and

with Brussels.

Role-theoretic approaches to British foreign policy recognize the importance of this

dynamic as well. They do so through a number of analytical links: role conceptions or

(discursive) self-understandings regarding the state’s international role and purpose; role

performances, or enactments of roles through policy choices and outputs; and role orientations,

which are foreign policy strategies that take into account one’s material and social constraints.

Observing British foreign policy debates circa 2010, Gaskarth (2014, 48) distills six such

orientations: "isolate, regional partner, influential (rule of law state), thought leader, opportunist

22
interventionist and great power.” These, he argues, are bounded by social expectations such that

“governments that deviate from script can face punishment or the very least confusion from

domestic audiences or other international actors.” So, if the UK can no longer fight major wars

alone, or even make division-sized contributions to deployments with allies, then a great power

role orientation will only create inconsistency and confusion at the level of British identity

discourses.30 The mutual constitution of identity and roles seems to be important even for David

McCourt (2014a), who argues that the key to understanding post-1945 British foreign policy is

not British identity but, rather, context-dependent expectations that emerge from the

international process of “role-taking,” “role-making,” and “alter-casting,” which relies on

discursive fit. His key finding is that the US and France continually cast Britain in a “residual

great power” role. But apparently so do the British people themselves: McCourt also finds

British leaders “framing their behavior in certain ways to make it fit” with prevailing ideas “at

home” – in the House of Commons, with the media, and with public opinion.31

Building on the above, we might say that any theoretical framework that purports to trace

how political authority in British foreign policy is “legitimized,” “narrated,” “framed,” or

“performed” requires an account of discursive fit. The problem is that most theorists focus only

on the manoeuvres political elites use to dominate meaning-making and to control debate. This I

find reductionist. Here is a much-quoted paragraph from Sir Oliver Franks’s Reith Lecture 1,

broadcast on BBC Radio on 7 November 1954:

The action of a Great Power can decisively affect the fate of other Great Powers in the

world. It is in this sense that we assume that our future will be of one piece with our past

and that we shall continue as a Great Power. What is noteworthy is the way that we take

this for granted. It is not a belief arrived at after reflection by a conscious decision. It is

23
 part of the habit and furniture of our minds: a principle so much one with our outlook and

character that it determines the way we act without emerging itself into clear

consciousness. (Franks 1954)

Franks’s six-part Reith Lectures series offers a superb glimpse into the postwar official

mind, partly because the lecturer carried them with all the gravitas one might expect of a

diplomat who had helped to negotiate both the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty.32 It

is also a startlingly accurate prediction of the future. Even after empire, he declared, the kingdom

would stay the course.33 But in the above passage we see that Franks lectured as a sociologist,

too. Great power pursuits are a matter of habit, a belief so routinized and solidified that most

people never even stop to think whether the label still makes sense. This is a conceptualization of

discursive fit with a twist, one in which mass culture and “high” politics work together to

generate Britain’s mental furniture.

Following this model, elite agency is deeply constrained by what is intelligible and

accepted in civil society at the level of “who is who,” that is, in the everyday discourses of who

“we” are and who “they” and “Others” are, or were, or aspire to be. Accordingly, a foreign policy

(framing, narrative, performance) will make sense if it (continuously) resonates with the

quotidian habits of the nation’s elites and masses (Gaskarth 2013, 92; see also Hopf 2010).

Attlee’s decision to quit India in 1947, Macmillan’s push for EEC membership in 1961, Wilson’s

“creative incompetence” during Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974, or Thatcher’s welcome of

Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 – a few examples of unconventional, far-sighted British

foreign policy action – were all contentious but not absurd. Conversely, a foreign policy

performance characterized by a complete discursive misfit lacks intelligibility, while one that fits

only a marginal discourse lacks acceptability. Either way, that policy performance lacks

24
legitimacy and likely cannot go on for long – think of that moment during the Suez Crisis when

the government in London found itself near-isolated internationally (unacceptable), or, for that

matter, a counterfactual situation in which a post-1945 government decided to pay reparations to

former colonies (unintelligible).

Reconstructing the habit and furniture of British minds is a worthy goal because it can

help us make and evaluate non-circular claims about why some foreign policy frames and

narratives – and so some foreign policy decisions and strategic choices – resonated and were

supported, while others struck a false note and were rejected. Interpretivists would always say

that “Suez” did not speak for itself, and neither did Britain, certainly not with a single voice.

Instead, various political actors – primarily but not exclusively those at the apex of the

Westminster-Whitehall system – fought hard to frame the crisis in some ways but not in others.

But what a good interpretivist account of the crisis also needs, I argue, is an independent account

of what then British society instinctively knew and felt about “us,” “them,” and “Others.”

Discursive fit can be, and often is, conceptualized as a causal mechanism. That said, fit

between foreign policy on the one hand and prevailing discourse or discourses on the other does

not, and cannot, imply a perfectly linear one-to-one match between a particular construction of

national identity and a particular foreign policy (Gaskarth 2014, 47). Instead, discursive fit

means that dominant discourses construct truths and realities within which policy is made and

unmade. This is precisely why many if not most constructivists draw a distinction between why

and how (or how-possible) questions. To go back to Doty (1996a, 4) again, why questions put

aside identity, while how questions problematize it. As in: Why did the government replace the

UK nuclear deterrent with another US-made, US-controlled system? Versus: How did the act of

throwing the country’s strategic lot with Washington become normal and legitimate? The latter

25
question is far more focused on productive power – that is, on the production of particular

subjects, objects, and interpretive sensibilities upon which the (nuclear) special relationship rests

(Croft 2001b).34

All this being said, basic factual questions are still important, especially for an account

that sets out to cover colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War contexts – namely, the period from

1950 to 2000. Although no professional historian –cultural, diplomatic, or otherwise – would

recognize this book as history, I do borrow historical methods, scale, and sensibility (on

historical IR, see Little 2008; Lawson 2012; Leira and de Carvalho 2016; on discursive

construction of temporal identity, see Hansen 2006). Consider the following questions taken

from the conventional historiography of decolonization, as articulated by Wendy Webster (2003,

3): “What was the impact on narratives of Britishness and Englishness of a diminution of British

territories and a contraction of its frontiers? How were the legacies of empire portrayed? Were

habits of mind associated with colonialism dismantled as rapidly or as extensively as British

colonial rule, or did they outlast the end of empire?” We could add a few more: To what extent

did Suez or the endless crises of the 1970s affect the identity repertoires through which British

society brought itself to life? Did the government push into the Common Market follow

significant transformations in dominant structures of feelings at either elite or mass levels? Was

the Thatcherite “New Right” successful in redefining the national senso comune, as Hall

famously predicted it would in January 1979, four months before Thatcher came to power? Did

the new 1988 National Curriculum for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in any way disrupt

the dominant “Anglo-Saxon” discourse, as Wallace hoped it would? Did shifts in the gendered

and racialized reproduction of the British state and society correlate with any discernible change

in Britain’s foreign policy ambitions?

26
 Engagement with these and similar questions is necessary in my account for two reasons.

The first is essentially Gramscian: if, as the Italian philosopher argued, powerful elite-run

institutions, such as political parties and mass media, reproduce a national common sense that is

shared by the elites and masses, it is likely that the identity of a country will remain stable for

some time. But if agreement on central categories is thin and highly contested, such that said

“vertical” consistency is missing, national identity is likely to remain fluid, with discourses

changing in accordance with historical action.35 Either way, a broader and deeper account of

Britishness is a precondition for understanding, not only in terms of continuity and change but

also in terms of policy alternatives that never came within the reach of actual policy.

The second reason relates to what IR scholars variously call “recursivity” and “looping

effects” (Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein 1996, 62; Whittaker 2017, 10; Doty 1996b; Mattern

2005). The basic notion here is that national identity simultaneously influences and is influenced

by state policy action, and that both processes have continuous and overlapping relations with

the structure of the international system. Analyses of foreign policy conducted from the

perspective of “tradition and dilemmas” put these dynamics at the forefront, too: to what extent

to traditions evolve upon the resolutions of dilemmas? (Bevir and Daddow 2015, 275, 283;

Bevir, Daddow and Schnapper 2015, 8). Therefore, in addition to examining how discourses of

Britishness influenced the shape of British foreign policy performances in certain historical

contexts, I also pay due attention to how British foreign policy performances wrote British

identity. This brings into play counterfactual reasoning – that is, reflection on how the British

decision makers would have responded to key watersheds had identity topographies been

different at the time or had they evolved differently.

27
 To sum up: I consider British foreign policy as a dynamic, three-way interaction between

decisions makers themselves, discourses of British identity into which decision makers are

socialized and within (or against) which foreign policy is made, and broader processes –

generational, cultural, and international – that confront decision makers with different challenges

within this nexus. Now I turn to the methodology I use to evaluate this framework.

Finding Britishness

All too often in the social sciences, national identity is approached via positivist methods.

Scholars come up with a list of national identities they expect to find in a community and then

they proceed to look for them via public opinion surveys, for example. The interpretivist goal, in

contrast, is to allow the subjects to speak for themselves as opposed to having the analyst speak

for them. We see this sensibility at work in a number of recent studies of British political culture

and citizen understandings of politics. Nick Clarke, Will Jennings, Jonathan Moss, and Gerry

Stoker (2018) mix textual data from Mass-Observation studies – that unique archive of British

everyday life – with a quantitative analysis of responses to public opinion surveys to examine

repertoires of cultural resources that defined British “anti-politics” in the postwar period.

Matthew Jones (2018) looks at what Mass-Observation reports said about the nation’s wars in

the Falklands, the Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Thomas Colley (2019) relies on

interviews to examine how ordinary British citizens narrate stories of Britain’s role in war and

Britain’s identity more generally.

I reconstruct the content, contestation, and evolution of post-1945 Britishness using

inductive discourse-analytic research that my collaborators and I conducted under the auspices of

28
Making Identity Count (MIC), a project to assemble the first constructivist database of national

identities for use in IR and in social sciences and humanities more generally.36 The analysis is

based on an archive of textual artefacts sampled in six ten-year intervals: 1950, 1960, 1970,

1980, 1990, and 2000. The texts are drawn from an assortment of everyday experiences and

institutional centres in the UK, with one eye on different forms, modes, and media of elite versus

mass communication. Leadership speeches; newspaper editorials, op-eds, and columns; and

secondary school history textbooks were taken to be sources of elite discourse, in contrast to

more mass-oriented letters to the editor to said newspapers, novels, and commercial feature

films. Table 1 is a summary of the documents used, with further details in Appendix A.37

TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

My sampling strategy raises a number of questions. To begin with, the elite-mass

distinction is, sociologically speaking, loose. This is by design. Rather than differentiating

between policy and cultural elites, or between elites and sub-elites, or between different types of

masses, I simply collected texts that can be credibly described as much talked about, highest

circulating, must-read, bestselling, or most watched, the theoretical principle being that elite and

mass publics are “co-authoring” the national identities contained therein. The former’s political

domination over the latter – even as “mere” consumers of texts – is thus an empirical question.

Next, the term “British” was invested with modern meaning through imperial projects

dreamed up in England – from the seventeenth-century colonization of Ireland to the 1707 Act of

Union between England and Scotland and its subsequent westward enlargement into Ireland in

29
1800. Always centred on London, this union of unions was furthermore constitutionalized as a

multinational, polyglot, and hegemonic empire whose patterns of historical development bear a

resemblance to similar polities elsewhere.38 The Britain I analyze in this book, however, refers to

its post-1945 iteration – what Edgerton (2018b) calls “national UK.”39 This is in line with

Gaskarth’s textbook definition of Britishness: an overarching national identity shared by many

members of the UK’s sub-state nationalities within the UK as a polity (Gaskarth 2013, 197–8n1;

cf. Schnapper 2011, 3–4; more generally: Gilroy 2004; Ward 2004).

One advantage of this definition is that it is sufficiently sensitive to the variability of both

“British citizenship” and “national UK” in the period under study.40 Indeed, the focus on national

identity categories must not preclude paying due attention to how non-national categories

become articulated within a British “we.” That being said, the reader will rightly inquire about

the Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo or, in nod to a proper “four nations”

approach, the Swansea-based South Wales Evening Post and Scottish history textbooks. Why

produce another study that treats the English as the British nation rather than as a British nation

(Gamble 2003, 3)? An equally strong case can be made for a less print-centric archive, not least

because radio and, from 1970 onwards, television were at least as popular as movies.41 So, where

are documentaries, soap operas, sitcoms, the FA football cup finals, and cooking shows? And

why not sample mass discourse from Mass-Observation, too?

My defence here rests on both principled and pragmatic reasons: principled, because my

analysis deliberately privileges England and, more specifically, London as the dominant site for

the discursive production of national UK; pragmatic, because an inductive recovery of a

repertoire of ideas from which the postwar elites and masses drew to identify themselves as

British is time-consuming even for a single year, much less for six. Doubtless, adding the

30
Liverpool Echo, the BBC’s To The Manor Born and That Sinking Feeling, and Bill Forsyth’s

Glaswegian comedy film would have enriched and diversified the corpus of texts for 1980. But it

would also have required hundreds of more coding hours. (The multimodal nature of discursive

meanings contained in film and television suggests that a single scene might contain dozens of

relevant references.)42 As for ordinary people-authored texts from Mass-Observation, no such

material exists for this particular year – the project was discontinued in the mid-1960s and was

revived only in 1981. So, while I would agree that the historical documents I use are far from

optimal, I would also say that optimal sources do not exist for the issues explored in this book.

The reader will note that my analysis heavily intersects with some social identities,

specifically those of privileged white men of a certain age and class. Among the leaders whose

speeches are examined here, for instance, all but one were white men and all but one were

Oxford-educated. The rest of the corpus is thankfully less Oxonian, yet there, too, the

overrepresentation of white men is nearly as overwhelming with regard to both authors and

characters.43 But locating the discursive imagination and articulation of a nationalist UK in its

white “malestream” is not necessarily a methodological shortcoming since it gives me an

opportunity to apply and evaluate select ideas drawn from feminist and postcolonial scholarship.

From the bomb to assorted invasions and reinvasions, postwar British foreign policy produced

and reproduced gendered hierarchies not only “abroad,” as between the West and non-West, but

also “at home,” as when some leaders feminize and emasculate their opponents by calling them

weak, risk-averse, or backward (McClintock 1995; Doty 1996a, chap. 5; Doty 1996b; Webster

2005; Basham 2018).

31
FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE

Figure 1 is a step-by-step visualization of the analytical process. The aforementioned

sampling strategy is shown as step 1. In step 2, dubbed finding identities, my collaborators and I

began with an effort to put aside any prefabricated ideas about what Britain meant or what it

meant to be British.44 We then used three basic inductive coding rules to code every reference to

“we” and “us” that appeared in the actual texts: valence – that is, positive, negative, neutral, or

ambiguous; aspirational/aversive – that is, whether or not the identity is one that the Self aspires

to or is trying to avoid; and significant Other, which refers to any broadly national categories to

which the Self compares itself in time and space (i.e., not just other countries but also historical

events, such as the Second World War or the Scottish Enlightenment, or ideologies, such as

liberalism or communism). The method forced us to differentiate mere themes (“leisure is

good”) from actual national identity categories (“the English like good leisure”) as well as to

examine local particulars and contingent meanings that might otherwise be lost when analysis

accepts either platitudes (“the British are militaristic”) or statements drawn from the media or

public opinion research (“young Britons rank Spain as a top vacation destination”).

By way of illustration, here is my coding of “No Trumpets,” an editorial published in the

Daily Express on 15 September 1960:

Where are the drums? Where are the trumpets? They do not sound for today’s

preliminary session of the Commonwealth economic conference.

The sad truth is that nothing of importance is likely to come out of this conference. It may

be that Empire lands like New Zealand, already worried about its tariff preferences, will

learn that the British Government means to reduce those preferences still more.

32
 The Government is more concerned with getting into the same trading system as Dr.

Adenauer than with developing the Empire trading system.

Who supposes that Dr Adenauer would give a fig for Europe if he had an empire?

In this text I observed four discrete identity categories: imperial, Germany, Europe, and trading. I

coded imperial as positive, with a note about the empire-Commonwealth interchange in which

New Zealand appears to be subsumed under the British Self. Germany and Europe were both

significant Others. The former, epitomized in the figure of its chancellor, was negatively

evaluated because of its ambition (regional domination) and inferiority (no empire). The latter

was merely neutral. Finally, though Britain was a trading nation, its aspiration was not free trade

so much as “the Empire trading system.”

Subjecting the entire 1960 corpus to the same procedure, I distilled numerous other

identity categories from what the texts said about who or what is excluded , and where the

boundaries between “us” and “them” were in those days versus where they were before and

where they might be in the future. Inspired by Gramsci’s theory of common sense, I likewise

looked at the meanings of “the good life” – what was a desirable way of life in 1960, a just and

normal way of ordering British society, its politics, economics, culture, spirituality, and so on.

While reading and coding, I also ran a tally of raw identity category counts and their prevailing

valence, first within texts and genres, and then across all five genres. This yielded a long list of

identity categories – 155 in this case – arranged by salience, from most frequent to least. The top

categories – the top 25 percent of all identity categories coded and counted for 1960 – were the

ones I discussed in detail, with ample examples provided. The category “patriarchal” topped this

33
list, followed by “class-based,” “statist,” “modern,” “just,” “technological,” “anti-Soviet,” and so

on.

In figure I.1, these two steps stand as “contextualization” (step 3) and

“intertextualization” (step 4). The purpose of this method is to balance the interpretivist

commitment to an inductive recovery of British identities in their local, historically constituted

contexts with a method that is more systematic, transparent, and replicable than is usually the

case with more traditional interpretivist measures of importance and prevalence of

intersubjective meanings.45 Looking at the findings from across all six years at once, I could thus

identify postwar Britain’s most significant Others as well as a dozen cross-cutting and

reoccurring identity categories (categories in brackets refer to their intersubjective near-

synonyms) across political, cultural, economic, and social dimensions. These include statist,

modern, class-based (unequal), democratic, patriarchal (manly), orderly (civilized), capitalist,

partisan, influential, declining, just (fair), and benevolent. I could likewise observe identities that

were specific to one or more years under study: post-imperial (from 1960), educated (to 1970),

diverse (2000 only), and so on.46

The final step in the analytical process, step 5, involved a reconstruction of a British

identity topography, or a map, for each year under study. This step was the most theoretical in

the sense that I clustered coded identity categories into prevailing (hegemonic, dominant) and

alternative (counter-hegemonic, subaltern) “discourses of Britishness” according to the observed

main discursive patterns: elite-mass unity versus elite-mass division, most significant Others, and

different identifications alongside political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of what

Britain or British meant in a given year. For 1960, for example, I identified three: a dominant

34
discourse, which I labelled Modern Britain, and its two challengers, Socialism and

Traditionalism.

I did this for all six years under study, thus completing what we might call a comparative-

static analysis (in which a compare-and-contrast is performed at different points in time but

without accessing data corresponding to the in-between period). This allowed me to take a

transversal view of the evolving British “we” and to see how different discourses might overlap

and how past discourses influenced future ones (Hall 1996c, 202; Hansen 2006, 55–66). A quick

summary of the main findings shows that British society perceived and conceived Britain as

fundamentally special: modern and prosperous, free and democratic, fair and just, capitalist and

industrial, beautiful and orderly, and peaceable and benevolent. These categories of identity

were “vertically shared”: they circulated not just among the ruling elites but also, to various

degrees, among the masses, and not just in what I call hegemonic discourses – I give them labels

such as “Recovery” and “Adaptable Britain” – but also in counterhegemonic discourses such as

“Socialism” and “Traditionalism.” They were also “sticky”: they existed in all six years under

study. So, however heterogeneous the understandings of Britishness and however radical the

generational and cultural transformations in society, the British “knew” they were, or were

supposed to be, unique. This construction could also be spatial, temporal and/or ethical, as in a

claim that our empire was not only the largest and historically most consequential, but essentially

and uniquely liberal. British exceptionalism, then, is the first essential component for

understanding the drive towards global power in British foreign policy long after such an

approach became all but unaffordable financially.

Britain – the noun I use to talk about a state that in fact prefers to be called “the UK” –

was predominantly, though not exclusively, an English project. This was more explicit in 1950,

35
when every other text seemed to conflate Britain (England, Wales, and Scotland) and even the

United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) with England, than after the 1970

Scottish devolution referendum, much less after actual devolution of power under New Labour.

Yet England was always Self, except when it referred to an unhappy past version of itself, as in

“Victorian England,” while Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, both north and south, wavered between

Self and Other, depending on the context. Similarly persistent was the deictic centring on the UK

and, more specifically, on England in phrases such as “the Home Counties,” “the island nation,”

“the mainland,” “the British Isles,” and, indeed, “the British.”47

The failure of the English to conceptually separate themselves from other British nations

went hand in hand with a tendency to view empire as something that England/Britain possessed,

not something that England/Britain was. This configuration changed from 1960, with the rise of

national as well as of postcolonial and post-imperial self-identifications – a “Socialist” embrace

of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, for example. It changed even more in 2000, when

“multiculturalism” was grafted onto cosmopolitanism to further emphasize the nation’s diversity,

inclusivity, and tolerance. What stayed the same was a practice of separating the state from its

violent imperial and colonial past – and from coloniality as a present condition – and the nation

from the presence of non-white citizens. And whereas mainstream discursive practices

eventually came to address sexism overtly and often in considerable depth (“we are a queendom

now”), this was never the case with racism, where the most common response was “we are not as

bad as others.”

Empire and its legacies configured the world map throughout and with variable effects on

Britain’s ontological security. The West was white, meaning majority populations of Western

polities were always racialized as white. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were proper

36
“British,” or “white Commonwealth,” countries and so peaceful, orderly, well governed, or just

simply lucky. The US, a.k.a. America, was Self and Other at once – not a Canada on steroids but

certainly part of the shared “English-speaking world,” to use Churchill’s parlance. Related, while

virtually everyone acknowledged American presidents as true leaders of the West, only a

minority accepted that the special relationship was the flying buttress to Britain’s own leadership

and privileged international status.

United States’s liminal status never extended to other former colonies, irrespective of

how much they shared with Britain its history, politics, culture, economics, law, media, and

familial ties. The “New Commonwealth,” later also described as “the Third World,” was

consistently on the outside, as were, with various degrees of separation and aversion, apartheid

South Africa, the Irish and French republics, the two Germanys (West and East), and “Europe”

(in latter years also known as “Brussels”). Soviet Russia was as menacing as Nazi Germany, the

defeat of which was a constant source of pride and of moral supremacy. Neither India nor China

were coded as top identity categories.

Britain also viewed itself as declining. Though present in all years, this identity category

was most systematically repeated and reworked in 1970 and 1980, when the kingdom’s industrial

economy and its masculine ideals – strength, pride, and independence – came under severe

attack. The question of what needed to be done about decline was subject to contestation, both

intra-elite as well as elite-mass. In some years, elite celebrations of economic progress (as in

Recovery) or socialist institutional life (as in Socialism) struggled to convince the masses,

committed as they were to certain traditions (as in Traditionalism). In other years, the discourses

advanced by Thatcher and her adherents (“Thatcherist”) regularly clashed with civil society’s

memories of le temps perdu. However, the more important finding is that most discourses in

37
most years were still bloated with affirmations of, and aspirations to, collective greatness –

scientific, civilizational, moral, and so on. Continuously reproduced and circulated, “greatness”

shaped how the British experienced historical change in the first place.

Understanding multiple and layered elements of British identity in this way is useful, I

argue, because it helps us recreate the ever-changing daily experience of both the governors and

the governed – that is, both the elites and the masses – and therefore the deeper intersubjective

structure within which Britain’s leaders operated in the post-1945 period.

Finding British Foreign Policy

The constructivist framework I develop and evaluate in this book sets out to illuminate British

relations with the rest of the world rather than particular British foreign policy choices. Some

empirical focus, however, is necessary. I begin with foreign policy debates – public exchanges

about merits and demerits of particular British foreign policies or policy situations. If my

framework is right, these debates should reflect and reinforce elite-mass connections and

disconnections at all times. Accordingly, the object of discourse analysis now shifts from civil

society to “the British foreign policy elite,” which is a convenient shorthand for texts produced

by influential individuals embedded in Whitehall, Westminster, and the London media, a.k.a.

Fleet Street (Sanders and Edwards 1994, 415–16; cf. Towle 2009).

To put temporal and spatial constraints on debates, I broke each of the six decades under

study into four “events,” for twenty-four in total, as listed in table I.2.

38
TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE

In principle, events include anything from external shocks and crises, government policy

U-turns – think Suez or East of Suez – to new information, knowledge, and broader processes

that mark the modern world, whether in the economy and politics, in ecology and technology, or

in migration and ethics. “Eventfulness” is a useful perspective from which to view history in

order to observe temporality and the logic transformation.48 War is a classic case because

winning in war make states ontologically secure – just look at the many ways in which Thatcher

tried to position the success of the Falklands War as the decisive locus of Britishness.

Conversely, endless, unwinnable wars on terror are likely to produce ontological anxiety

(Subotić and Steele 2018).

In this study, I focus specifically on “foreign policy events,” which I selected in

accordance to three selection rules: temporal proximity, spatial diversity, and paradigmatic

relevance (Appendix B, figure B.1). The first rule has to with the underlying causal logic: the

idea that the temporal gap between an identity topography and the corresponding event should be

shorter rather than longer. This is why, for example, I decided to look at de Gaulle’s “first veto”

of 1963, not his “velvet veto” of 1967.

The second rule follows from the aforementioned wager that topographies of Britishness

can shed light on multiple developments in British foreign policy during a given period.

Accordingly, for each decade under analysis I selected events corresponding to each of

Churchill’s famous “three circles” of British foreign policy: one for the British Commonwealth

and Empire, one for the United States and other “English-speaking peoples,” and one for

“Europe.” As many scholars have noted, “three circles” was never so much a heuristic device for

39
describing the competing priorities of British world power as the reigning “framework” that

configured postwar Britain as sitting at “the very point of junction” of these three spaces and the

go-to “conceptual prism” through which, for decades, actual foreign policy events were

processed.49 The expression “squaring the circles of British foreign policy” is still being used

(Hill 2019, 8, 180).

Paradigmatic relevance refers to events that have already been used to evaluate or

highlight constructivist and interpretivist claims concerning postwar British foreign policy.50 I

followed this rule on the assumption that my book would not be readers’ first (or last) exposure

to the historical period, debates, and events under discussion. This led to two benefits and one

drawback. The first benefit is range. In looking at the event now simply known as Suez, for

example, I draw on studies of the crisis attuned to the role of political rhetoric and discourse and,

for additional context, on studies dealing with the press and the parties, including their

“backbench tribes” (e.g., Onslow 1997; Mattern 2005; Towle 2009; McCourt 2014b; Thomas

and Toye 2017). Similarly, I pay close attention to secondary interpretations of “paths not

taken,” “missteps,” and “missed opportunities,” meaning the conditions under which British

leaders could have legitimately broken alternative paths, such as “more Europe” or alignment

with Washington à la française.51 This literature provides crucial insight into the policy options

British leaders considered before they chose some and rejected others.

The second benefit is greater attention to “silences” – vital areas not addressed in policy

discussions. As Heuser (1998, 5, emphasis in original) notes, actual foreign policy debates were

rare in postwar Britain: “Typically, basic concepts are not spelled out, but taken for granted, just

as consensus on them is taken for granted.” Attention to the unspoken, implicit references can be

found in most such analyses but especially in discourse analytic accounts. I naturally heed the

40
contextual aspects of said silences, as when all decision makers agreed that foreign policy is

special policy because of, for example, “immutable structural dictates” or “the need for

secrecy.”52

Reliance on secondary sources poses assorted risks: priming, bias, misinterpretation and

omissions, among others. I minimized this drawback in two ways. First, I consulted secondary

literature only after completing steps 1 through 5 (figure I.1) for all years under study. Second, to

estimate the influence and centrality of the people quoted and cited to the debates under study, I

worked with multiple histories and analyses, occasionally analyzing primary sources directly.

Whenever major interpretative differences emerged I flagged the reader in an endnote.

Wading beyond foreign policy, I added a selection of defence reviews to my analysis as

well. I did this for two reasons. First, as Denis Healey, one of most influential postwar defence

ministers, remarked, defence policy often “came to determine foreign policy due to the fact that

all commitments were considered to be vital” (quoted in Rees 2001, 30). In other words, there is

evidence that high military expenditure had the effect of determining the nature of Britain’s post-

1945 global role rather than the latter determining the degree of the former. Second, defence

reviews, as declaratory policy (Dorman 2001, 9), are in principle deeply “eventful.” Produced by

bureaucrats under the direction of the government (minister) of the day and then presented to the

legislators and the public, these documents – also called statements on defence or defence white

papers – are indeed elaborate documents that address the past, present, and future of defence

policy, laying out both geostrategic rhetoric (cf. Porter 2010) and (the ever more difficult)

budgetary considerations. As such, they tend to prompt public contestation about national

priorities and policy trade-offs, thus giving constructivist researchers yet another vantage point

41
from which to analyze the (putative) pathologies in Britain’s relations with the rest of the world

(Croft 2001a).

Table I.2 lists at least one defence review for each decade (for bibliography, see

Appendix B). In addition to analyzing the textual content of each, I combed through relevant

historical studies to determine what parts, if any, of said documents were publicly debated, and

with what effects for my analysis of the identity-foreign policy nexus overall.

Together, these methodological choices provide a chronologically structured,

geographically diverse, and relatively efficient discussion of postwar British foreign policy. In

addition to crossing colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War contexts, the chapters that follow

thus cover Britain’s relations with the individual states of the First, Second, and Third Worlds,

both bilaterally and within multilateral international institutions. And although

“security themes” predominate, the empirical testbed is still broad enough to cover a myriad of

separate yet, from my perspective, conspicuously intertwined phenomena.

To sum up, my goal in this book is to demonstrate the validity of a properly constructivist

reading of Britain’s international (mal)adjustments after 1945. Although many British foreign

policy analyses now routinely incorporate identity, discourse, and habits, they rarely attempt to

recover these intersubjective structures inductively, much less over time and across the elite-

mass divide. This is a lost opportunity from both theoretical and analytical viewpoints for only a

wide-angled lens allow us to see patterns of continuity and change in said structures as well as to

locate relevant parallels among them.

42
Plan of the Book

The next six chapters are arranged chronologically, covering the six decades between Attlee’s

“New Jerusalem” and Blair’s “New Labour.” Each is structured as a three-part discussion:

 Summary of the main findings and arguments.

 Discussion of top British identity categories with examples drawn from the

corresponding MIC report. For presentational purposes, I plot top identity categories

measured by frequency in word clouds, where larger and darker words represent

categories that were coded as most frequent.

 Reconstruction of a topography of contemporary Britishness and a reconsideration of

select foreign policy events in light of said topography.

In the conclusion, I summarize the findings and compare them to other accounts of British

foreign policy. And while this discussion is primarily about competing interpretations of the past,

I end on a speculative note, briefly considering what the future might hold in store.

Notes

1
The first aphorism, which likely belongs to late Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak, came from

Danish finance minister Kristian Jensen (Boffey 2017) and then also from Spanish foreign minister

Joseph Borrell (Sharma 2019). The second comment came from the president of the EU’s European

Council Donald Tusk (Reuters 2019).

2
The phrases are from Prime Minister Theresa May (Blagden 2019; Daddow 2019; Ward and Rasch

2019).
3
This is a vast literature that begins with Gallagher and Robinson (1953).

43
4
Craig and Radchenko (2008, 79–80). See also Harrison (2009, 9); Hopf (2012, 79–80); and Shifrinson

(2018, 1). On status recognition as a function of assorted competitive performances in international

society, see Røren and Beaumont (2019); Ward (2019); and Murray (2019).
5
The definition is from Shifrinson (2018, 13–15). In his estimation, the UK’s European capabilities

declined from 11 to 14 percent to 8 percent and from 22 to 33 percent to 20 percent vis-à-vis the US (16,

chap. 2). For a range of alternative characterizations of Britain’s great powerhood, see Blagden (2019, 4–

7).
6
Gamble (2000, 5; 2003, 27–8). See also Holland (1991); Clarke (2004 [1996]); English and Kenny

(2000); Hall (2000); Croft (2001a); Hall (2012, 4); Simms (2016, chap. 9); Tomlinson (2017, chap. 2);

and Green (2020, chap. 1).

7
On the consensus and its subsequent iterations, see McCourt (2014a, 4; 2014b, 165); Self (2010, 6, 36–

7); Heinlein (2002, 137); and Harrison (2009, 5, 115–16). Note also that the descriptor “postwar” works

to elide the history and politics of imperial decline (Bailkin 2012; Schofield 2013; Burkett 2013).
8
Bevin pitched the notion to the French and continued to champion it well into 1949. He was not alone.

Some Third Forcers in London argued for territorial expansion (Bevin had an eye on the Italian colonies

in particular), others for a rapid industrial development of empire, and still others for bringing select

European countries into the Commonwealth (Bevin’s “Western Union” speech of 1948 can be read this

way). France had its Third Forcers at the time too. See Barker (1983); Vickers (2003); Daddow (2004);

Darwin (1991); Heinlein (2002); Deighton (2013); and Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016).

9
The sequel, The Friends of Harry Perkins, was published in March 2019. In Mullin’s vision of the

future, set in 2025, Brexit negotiations are still inconclusive, the Labour Party is in continued opposition,

and the US is at war with China. Note that Haseler (2012) counts Attlee, Wilson, and Blair among

potential change agents.

44
10
Larsen (1997, chap. 1); Bell (1997, chaps. 5–8); McCourt (2014a, 5, 182n24); Hill (2016, 395; 2019,

137–9); and Thomas and Toye (2017, 230–7). On comparative post-imperial pathways more generally,

see Thomas (2014); and Buettner (2016).

11
“Reverential” is from Gaskarth (2013, 68). “Unsinkable aircraft carrier” is Churchill’s phrase

(Campbell 1986, 1); Orwell actually preferred “Airstrip One” (Vucetic 2011b, 1).
12
Powell’s was in fact a double critique of British foreign policy: against the idea of global leadership –

whether via the Commonwealth or the Common Market – and against the nineteenth-century idea of a

free-trading little Englandism (Schofield 2013; see also Shilliam 2018, 96–106; Kenny and Pearce 2018,

chap. 4).
13
On Labour’s attraction to the Swedish model, see Harrison (2009, 119). Exemplarity can be defined as

“the social process through which standards of conduct are formulated, sustained, and re-worked” (Noyes

and Wille 2020). On the UK case, see Harrison (2009, 544–5; Harrison 2010, 547–8); and Gaskarth

(2014, 47). For the anti-nuclear movement in particular, see Heuser (1998); and Croft (2001b).
14
Speech in Manchester on 4 July 1948, quoted in Edgerton (2018b, 82).
15
See, inter alia, Holland (1991); Mangold (2002); Darwin (2009); Self (2010); Morris (2011); and

Simms (2016). The argument is sometimes extended to defence policy as well (Baylis 1989; cf. Rees

2001).
16
For examples, see Cain and Hopkins (2016); Wearing (2014, 2018).
17
Introduced by Robinson and Gallagher, writing with Alice Denny, in 1961, the term “official mind”

originally referred to the body of bureaucrats tasked with governing colonial affairs from London, but it

has since been stretched to refer to the foreign and defence policy apparatus more broadly or even to a

larger group of professionals sharing a common set of beliefs about said policy (Robinson, Gallagher, and

Denny 1961; see also Heinlein 2002; Haseler 2007; Self 2010; Haseler 2012; Bevir and Daddow 2015).

In general, the bureaucrats were less willing to cling to grandeur than were the politicians (Blackwell

1993, 25–7; Self 2010, 300).

45
18
Sanders and Houghton (2017, x). See also Mabon, Garnett, and Smith (2017, chap. 1). Some of these

concepts now appear even in parliamentary documents on foreign policy (Gaskarth 2014, 42–3; Vucetic

2020b, 79–80).
19
Quotes from Wallace (1991, 79, 66, 75, 69). See also Wallace (2000; 2005a; 2005b). On

exceptionalism, see also Larsen (1997); Young (1998); Rees (2001); Baker (2002); Gamble (2003);

Marcussen et al. (1999); Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016); Sanders and Houghton (2017); Daddow (2011, 2015b,

2018); and Wellings (2019, esp. chap. 4).

20
Note the semantics here: some argue the third “e” in Brexiteer was inserted strategically to invoke pride

in the buccaneers and privateers of the sixteenth century, and their legendary “swashbuckling”

endeavours (Ward and Rasch 2019, 3; see also Barnett 2018, chap. 13). On the historical constitution of

Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Saxonism, see, for example, Vucetic (2011b, chap. 2) and Shilliam (2018, chap.

3), and compare to Atlanticists and Atlanticism (Gamble 2003, 80–2; Dunne 2004).
21
There are now hundreds of discrete studies of foreign policy that conceptualize nations as

intersubjective social-cognitive structures that constitute the space where ideas, emotions, institutions, and

practices intersect to affect collectively binding actions at the level of states, regions, and the international

system as a whole (Vucetic 2017a, 2018). Constructivist IR, however, is similar but not identical to

interpretivist British foreign policy scholarship (Bevir, Daddow, and Hall 2013; Bevir, Daddow, and

Schnapper 2015; Daddow and Gaskarth 2011; Schnapper 2011; Gaskarth 2013; Edmunds, Gaskarth, and

Porter 2014; Bevir and Daddow 2015).

22
His context is Norman Tebbit’s infamous “cricket test” (Ward 2004, 82–3, 115). Compare with Doty

(1996b, 126). On the conflation of state and national identity in IR, see Berenskoetter (2014, 263).
23
These are simplified definitions only: senso comune, or common sense, refers to the content of popular,

everyday knowledge. Structures of feeling and habitus both refer to the broader intersubjective

dispositions that produce common sense, whereby the former concept stresses the affective dispositions

46
and the latter stresses the cognitive ones. Doxa refers to the unarticulated, taken‐for‐granted elements of

common sense.
24
For recent examples of Hallsian analyses of British life in history and sociology, see, respectively,

Vernon (2017); and Valluvan (2019).

25
Students of popular culture in IR and political geography see it the same way: masses routinely

elaborate, negotiate, rework, or challenge elite positions. See, for example, Saunders and Strukov (2018),

and compare with studies of British foreign policy that focus on liberal propaganda, capitalism, and/or the

class system (e.g., Curtis 1995; Haseler 2012; Cain and Hopkins 2016; Wearing 2018).
26
For a more sustained engagement with this large literature, including Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller‐Idriss

(2008), Michael Skey (2009) and others from a loosely Gramscian perspective, see Vucetic and Hopf

(2020).
27
Since the mid-2000s (e.g., Mitzen 2006), ontological security has become a workhorse for

constructivist IR theorizing of the social-cognitive and emotional underpinnings of agents’ motivation for

action (Gaskarth 2013, 61–4).

28
Neoclassical realism posits that all states seek survival because the international system is

fundamentally anarchic, but it explains foreign policies by focusing on the interaction of (independent)

systemic and (intervening) domestic-level variables such as, in this case, national identity.
29
See Henderson, Wincott, and Jones (2017); Oliver (2018); Wellings (2019); and O’Toole (2018). For

further context, See Kumar (2003); and Kenny (2014).

30
This goes double for attempts to pursue clashing role orientations: “One cannot be an influential/rule of

law state and at the same time seek to transgress international law in an opportunist-interventionist

fashion” (Gaskarth 2014, 64).

31
McCourt (2014a, 15). Elsewhere he has intimated that roles are at once situation-specific and sensitive

to societal transformations (McCourt 2014b, 175). We could thus say that role theory sees foreign policy

as a practice performed in and through joint actions involving Self-Other relations in multiple locales and

47
at different scales, and not “just” at the intersection of the international and domestic environments. Space

prevents me from engaging with this rich literature further, but see, inter alia, Hill (1979); Breuning

(1995); Macleod (1997); MccGwire (2006); Gaskarth (2014, 2016); McCourt (2011); Morris (2011);

Aggestam (2012); Daddow (2015a; 2019); Blagden (2019); Strong (2018); and Oppermann, Beasley, and

Kaarbo (2019).
32
Only Lecture 3, “The Atlantic Bridge,” is available for listening:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hg2c7. On the significance of Franks, see Danchev (1993).

33
Franks (1954). He likewise correctly dismissed isolationism as impossible (Gaskarth 2014, 48–51; Hill

2019, 8).
34
Two additional points. First, like Doty, most interpretivists shy away from making causal claims (e.g.,

Hansen 2006, 22–5). But how questions are causal also depends on one’s underlying theory of causation

(compare, inter alia, Wendt 1999, 55–6, 87; Klotz 2008, 50–1; Navari 2008, 40–1; Kurki 2008, 184;

Vucetic 2011a, 1307–11; McCourt 2014a, 46–53). Second, the “ideal type” interpretivist research design

encompasses detailed accounts of how situated agents exert their agency (Bevir and Daddow 2015, 281–

3). This is beyond the scope of my study. And suffice it to say, the goal of the present approach to

supplement, not supersede, other approaches (Humphreys 2015, 580).

35
On elite-mass verticality, see Colley (2019, 4–5); Clarke et al. (2018, 6); and, more broadly, Hall

(1996a); and Whitmeyer (2002).

36
The project website is https://www.makingidentitycount.org. See also Hopf and Allan (2016).
37
All supplementary files are available at https://www.makingidentitycount.org/united-kingdom (see, in

particular, Vucetic, “A How-to Guide for Project Contributors,” December 2015; and Vucetic, “The

United Kingdom, 1950–2000: Primary Texts,” 23 June 2016). On research design and methodological

details, see Allan (2016); cf. Hansen (2006, chap. 5).

38
Polities centred on Istanbul, Madrid, and Moscow come to mind. On British political development and

Britishness, see, inter alia, Colley (2009 [1992]); Burton (1997); Paul (1997); Robbins (1998); Kumar

48
(2003); Gamble (2003); Ward (2004); Darwin (2009); Barkawi and Brighton (2013); Kenny (2014);

Bhambra (2016); Vernon (2017); Shilliam (2018); and Wellings (2019).

39
For an argument that a unifying, national, and mass democratic culture in the UK had already emerged

in the 1930s – thanks to the deep penetration of popular daily newspapers, the cinema, and other media

infrastructures into daily life – see LeMahieu (1998). On the role of scholars, such as Richard Hoggart

and Raymond Williams, and scholarly methods, such as Mass-Observation, see Savage (2010).
40
Britishness is not the same as British citizenship (Croft 2012, 4; Doty 1996b, 130). While in 1948 the

latter encompassed all subjects of the empire, in 1962, as we see in chapter 2, it came down to the

territory of the UK and British Overseas Territories, plus the diaspora – British-born people living abroad.

As for the national UK, Edgerton locates its decline in the 1970s, which witnessed the beginning of the

internationalization of finance and production and the rise of subnational nationalism. To this we could

also add the decline in political participation since the late 1980s.
41
On mass media and Britishness, see LeMahieu (1988) and McClintock (1995). While weekly cinema

audiences went down from around 26 million circa 1950 to around 14 million circa 1960, this was still

about the same as the total circulation of all daily national newspapers and more than the total television

program consumption figure. Note also that, in 1960, the BBC and ITV were each restricted to a seven-

hour broadcasting day. For further details, see Appendix A; Webster (2005, 6); and Harrison (2009, 54–

8).
42
Consider any number of James Bond films: in addition to looking at how camera angles and light

illuminate, say, the portrait of the Queen, the coder must also pay attention to music, sound, and bodies,

including the manner in which the protagonist touches objects and people (Funnell and Dodds 2017).
43
British print media consumption likewise reflected and reproduced one’s class and political

identification. In Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Announced, which is one of my sources in chapter 1, most

characters seem to read more than one newspaper daily, in addition to the village newspaper and

newsmagazines. Colonel Easterbrook reads the Times, the main establishment newspaper. The rich Miss

49
Blacklock likes the conservative Daily Mail. The eccentric Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd prefer

the Liberal Party-leaning New Chronicle. Only the cranky (and wealthy) writer Edmund Swettenham

reads the pro-communist Daily Worker.

44
The analysts – none of whom resided in the UK at the time of research – were asked to tune out UK

news (especially Brexit) and UK history (especially social and cultural [e.g., Spiering 2014]) until all

coding and analysis was complete. My own researcher subjectivity reflections are in Vucetic (2017b).
45
Together, Steps 3 and 4 could be dubbed “interpretive quantification” (Barkin and Sjoberg 2017).

Compare Doty (1996a) and Hansen (2006).

46
For summary tables as well as for lists of all counted identity categories with coding examples, see full-

length UK identity reports at the project website: https://www.makingidentitycount.org/united-kingdom.

47
Scholars often lament the fact that no word but “British” exists to describe UK citizens as a group (e.g.,

Harrison 2010, xv). The term “British and Northern Irish” is merely a regional census category, whereas

Tom Nairn’s 1980s-vintage “Ukanians” has adherents only among the New Left.
48
On eventfulness as a methodological technique, see Hansen (2006, 27–9); Skey (2009: 8, 117-9); and

Guzzini (2012, 52–4). Compare to the concept of a dilemma (Bevir and Daddow 2015, 275, 280–1).
49
Nearly fifty years after Churchill introduced this trope, Blair insisted that Britain was a “power that is at

the crux of the alliances and international politics which shaped the world and its future” (quoted in Self

2002, 5). See also Kenny and Pearce (2018, 55–6); Sanders and Houghton (2017, 1-4); Simms (2016,

672); Gaskarth (2013, 66-68); Daddow and Gaskarth (2011, 13); Gamble (2003, 220); Reynolds (2000,

chap. 8); Young (1998, 32–5); and Larsen (1997, 52).

50
On paradigmatic cases, see Flybjerg (2006, 15–16). On case selection in constructivist IR, see Klotz

(2008).
51
A sample: Deighton (1990); Taylor (2016) [1991], chap. 4); Dell (1995); Clarke (2004 [1996]); Bell

(1997); Young (1998); Peden (2012); Bevir, Daddow, and Schnapper (2015); Daddow (2015b); Grob-

Fitzgibbon (2016); Smith (2017); and Hill (2019, chap. 2).

50
52
Even if we accept that audience effects are potentially present even in the most secretive policy arenas

(e.g., Cormac and Aldrich 2018; Gun 2020), the fact remains that overt and covert foreign policy actions

are qualitatively different (e.g., Heuser 1992; Cormac 2018), as are (“American,” “Blairite”) “sofa circle”

discussions in comparison to parliamentary debates or white papers in comparison to cabinet-level memos

(e.g., Wallace 1975; Gaskarth 2013).

51
52
53
Table 1. Finding Britishness, 1950‐2000
Year Speeches Newspapers Textbooks Films Novels

1950 Attlee. King’s Speech, Daily Express Carter & Mears. History of Britain. The Blue Lamp Christie. A Murder Is Announced
(Lab) 1.3.
Attlee. Margate, Daily Mirror Rayner. Short History of Britain What the Butler Shute. A Town Like Alice
3.10. Saw
1960 Macmillan. Scarborough, Daily Express Barker & Ollard. General History of Doctor in Love Fleming. Dr No
(Cons) 15.10. England
Macmillan. Queen’s Daily Mirror Strong. History of Britain and the World Sink the Christie. 4.50 from Paddington
Speech, 1. 11. Bismarck!
1970 Wilson. HC Deb on Daily Express Titley. Machines, Money and Men On Her Majesty's Christie. Endless Night
(both) Address 2.6 Secret Service
Heath. HC Deb on Add. Daily Mirror Larkin. English History Battle of Britain MacLean. Force 10 from Navarone
2.6.
1980 Thatcher. Brighton. Daily Express Hill. British Economic and Social History Life of Brian Forsyth. The Devil’s Alternative
(Cons) 10.10. 1700‐1975
Queen’s Speech. Daily Mirror Sked & Cook. Post‐War Britain McVicar Smith. Wild Justice
7. 11.
1990 Queen’s Speech. The Sun Kavanagh & Morris. Consensus Politics Shirley Valentine Forsyth. The Negotiator
(Cons) 7. 11.
Major. 'First Speech', Daily Mirror Connolly & Barry. Britain 1900‐1939 & The Krays Smith. A Time to Die
4. 12. May. Economic and Social History
2000 Blair. Brighton. The Sun Walsh. Modern World History. Chicken Run Rowling. Harry Potter and the Goblet
(Lab) 26. 9. of Fire
Blair. ‘Britain speech’ Daily Mail Culpin & Turner. Making Modern Gladiator Rowling. Harry Potter and the
28. 3. Britain Philosopher’s Stone
NOTES: Coding was done from June 2015 to December 2017. For more on source selections, including complete bibliography, see Appendix A. For complete
reports, detailed coding guidelines and coding examples, and other supplementary files, go to the project website https://www.makingidentitycount.org/
The reports for 1980, 1990, and 2000 are co‐authorships with, respectively, David Orr, Kristen M. Olver and Alyssa Maraj Grahame. Kazim Rizvi, Melanie
Mitchell and Kalathmika Natarajan provided invaluable research assistance in identifying and collecting historical materials.

54
Table 2 Parliaments, governments, prime ministers, foreign ministers & events, 1950‐2000
Parliament Gov't Prime Minister Foreign Minister* Events (incl. Defence Reviews)
1950 Labour Clement Attlee Ernest Bevin 1950s
Herbert Morrison Korea
1951 Cons. Winston Churchill Sir Anthony Eden Suez Crisis
1955 Anthony Eden Harold Macmillan Schuman & Pleven Sandys (1957)
Selwyn Lloyd
1957 Harold Macmillan 1960s
1959 Alec Douglas‐Home Winds of Change
1964 Labour 1963 Sir Douglas‐Home Richard Austen Butler Skybolt Affair
Harold Wilson Patrick Gordon Walker De Gaulle veto Healey (1966)
1966 Michael Stewart
George Brown 1970s
1970 Cons. Michael Stewart East of Suez
Edward Heath Sir Alec Douglas‐Home Nixon Shocks
1974 Labour** Harold Wilson James Callaghan EC Entry Mason (1975)
1979 Cons. 1976 James Callaghan Anthony Crosland
David Owen 1980s
1983 Margaret Tharcher Baron Carrington Falkands Islands
Francis Pym Trident purchase
1987 Sir Geoffrey Howe Thatcher's rebate Nott (1981)
John Major
1990 John Major Douglas Hurd 1990s
1992 Malcolm Rifkind Gulf War
Bosnia King (1990)
Maastricht Rifkind (1994)

1997 Labour Tony Blair Robin Cook 2000s

2001 Jack Straw Iraq
War on Terror Hoon (2002)
2005 The euro Hoon (2003)
Margaret Beckett
*In 1968 Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs became Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
** Labour (minority) from February to October 1974 and again from 1976.

55
56
Appendix A

Archive

Given that ethnography is limited to the present and the immediate past, the most valuable

interpretivist methodology for reconstructing postwar Britishness is an inductively oriented

discourse analysis. Assembling an archive or corpus for such analysis can be a challenging task

in that there seems to be both a huge number of possible texts from which national identity

categories can be recovered and an abundance of different, often conflicting, texts about what

counts as elite versus mass discourse in a given historical period. This selection strategy follows

the theoretical and methodological rationale set out in the Making Identity Count project

https://www.makingidentitycount.org/.

Leadership speeches

Our aim was to select two speeches that were at once high circulating, regular (“annual”), and on

“anything but national identity” (nothing on devolution or “The Future of Britishness,” for

example). The prime minister’s statements in the “State Opening of Parliament,” a new session

of Parliament, and the “annual party conference speech” met these criteria. With respect to the

first, the UK government’s legislative program (a.k.a. the ministerial agenda) for the forthcoming

parliamentary session is traditionally laid out in the Queen’s Speech (in 1950, it was the King’s

Speech), a.k.a. the “Most Gracious Speech from the Throne.” Set in 1852, the ceremony is part

of the UK’s “unwritten” constitution, which relies heavily on understandings and assumptions

more than on hard rules. The Queen’s Speech is prepared by the Prime Minister’s Office, and the

monarch reads it as a matter of her constitutional duty. In the period under study, the

combination of the royal pomp and disclosure of the upcoming policies and pieces of legislation

57
by the government naturally attracted significant media attention, including a live television

audience.

Party conferences in the UK serve to rally their constituencies, gain a few days of

newspaper headlines, and raise money. They also normally take place in early fall and away

from the capital city – in Birmingham or Brighton, for example. They have also evolved over

time, with latter years witnessing the emergence of workshops, book fairs, movie screenings, and

other events within them. In the immediate postwar decades, the party conference was a site of

policy-making; from about 1980 onwards, it became an opportunity for image-making. The

prime minister’s speech was always the central event, however.

We departed from this rule thrice. In 1970, the UK had a change of government and we

decided to have one leadership speech from each the two prime ministers that year: the outgoing

Wilson (Labour) and the incoming Heath (Conservative). We selected the speeches the two

leaders gave in the post-election State Opening on 2 July. Both speeches were given during the

“Debate on the Address,” a.k.a. “Loyal Address,” which is occurs when members of both houses

debate the content of the speech (an “Address in Reply to Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech”) –

another long-standing parliamentary ritual.

In the year 1990 the UK again had two prime ministers: Margaret Thatcher resigned on

22 November. The subsequent leadership contest within the Conservative Party was carried by

John Major, chancellor of the exchequer, who then became the nation’s leader on 28 November

1990. His speech at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre on 4 December 1990 was his first

as prime minister.

58
 In 2000, we selected Tony Blair’s “Britain Speech” on 28 March, rather than the Queen’s

Speech or his statement in the Debate on the Address on 6 December. This was done to reflect

the changing nature of mass mediation of leadership speeches in the internet age and because of

the fact that this speech had been widely received as “the” statement of “Blairism” and Blair’s

attempt to “rebrand” the UK.

Newspapers

We followed the rankings based on the Press Council and Audit Bureau of Circulations

circulation figures or the closest equivalent. Accordingly, we selected the Daily Express and the

Daily Mirror from 1950 through 1980, the Sun and the Daily Mirror for 1990, and the Sun and

the Daily Mail for 2000. Although in national circulation numbers the Sun had already overtaken

the Daily Express in 1980, we continued to use the latter due to some difficulties in gaining

access to the former’s archive. With this selection, we achieved some variance in the ownership

structures and ideological orientations of newspapers known as “popular” or “mass-market”

(a.k.a. “red-tops” or “tabloids”). We sampled the editions published on the fifteenth day of each

month, including, when appropriate, Sunday equivalents of the selected newspaper (the Sunday

Mirror, the Sunday Express, the Mail on Sunday but not the News of the World).1

History textbooks

For each year under study we selected the two high school-level publications on modern English

or British history that were most likely to have been used at the time in private and state schools

in the UK, primarily in England. To that end, we reviewed the histories and institutional contexts

of the educational program in history in England and then combed contemporary and historical

59
reviews and discussions in the journals Teaching History and History of Education Review.

While it is true that UK history teachers began to use textbooks in their classrooms only

following the introduction of the history General Certificate of Education Exam (GCSE) and the

National Curriculum initiative in the late 1980s, it is still the case that numerous textbooks – and

“topic-books” – existed and circulated throughout the period under study. Whenever appropriate,

we used publications catering to students between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, particularly

those studying for history GCSE and history A Level exams (the more advanced qualifications

generally required for university entrance) or their closest historical equivalents (CSE/O-Level).

Next, for ample reflection we looked at “the last hundred years,” whatever the type of history

(economic, social, cultural, political etc.), as well as at “recent editions” – that is, editions

published in the beginning of the year or in the preceding year or two – 1958 or 1959 for 1960,

for example. If one of the two textbooks we selected covered only a short period of history

and/or was exceptionally short, we added a third textbook to our sample.2

Novels

Identifying “bestselling novels” was challenging. To select two top-selling items on the

consumer market of books, bought by private individuals for their own use or as gifts, in each

year, we first consulted scholarly histories of the book and of the UK fiction industry. For 1950

and 1960, we consulted annual round-ups of the bestseller market produced by W.H. Smith’s

Trade News, the Observer, the Bookseller, the Evening Standard, the Evening News, Time and

Tide, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Daily Express and picked the two British-authored novels

closest to the top of each list.3 For 1970 and 1980, the reliability of bestseller lists improved

thanks to the introduction of surveys, automated data collection (after 1980), and other ranking

60
instruments. Especially helpful were secondary assessments of said lists published in specialist

magazines such as the Listener, a weekly BBC magazine published until 1991, and by journalist

Alex Hamilton in the Guardian (from 1970 onwards). For 1990 and 2000, we followed the

rankings generated by computerized data capture via Electronic Point-of-Sale equipment and

disseminated by companies such as Nielsen BookScan. As Table I.1 in the introduction shows,

several authors appear in multiple years: Fleming, Christie, Smith, Forsyth, and Rowling.4

The paperback revolution changed our selection criteria as well since it rendered

paperback the dominant format for bestsellers. First, the paperback revolution changed the

meaning of high-circulating: in the late 1940s, a top hardback novel would achieve sales of

100,000 over several years, whereas in the 1990s a bestselling paperback would have 500,000

copies sold in weeks. Second, this means that some our “bestselling novels of the year” after

1960 were in fact paperback editions of a hardback released a year, or two or three, before the

year of the study. In 1960, we thus selected Ian Fleming’s Dr No, released in March 1958 over

Fleming’s For Your Eyes Only, released in April 1960. In principle, either one would have been

acceptable as UK readers en masse were enjoying multiple of Fleming’s Bond novels. However,

Dr No, the sixth book in the espionage adventure series, topped that year’s bestseller with more

than 150,000 copies sold thanks to the paperback release in February as well as, to a lesser

extent, to both text and comic-strip serializations occurring that year in the Daily Express. For

Your Eyes Only, in contrast, was released in hardback and sold fewer than 22,000 copies.5 The

same rationale applied to 4.50 from Paddington, a novel by Agatha Christie first published in

November 1957 but appearing in paperback three years later with Fontana Books.6

Movies

61
To select top watched movies by UK directors we followed two strategies. For the 1950 to 1980

period, we referred to the end-of-the-year movie reports published in the Times. Based on the

annual surveys of box-office returns (including both “general release” and “reserved tickets”)

collected and analyzed by the industry publication Motion Picture Herald, these reports do not

provide details such as the numbers of viewers, but they helpfully identify and sometimes rank-

order most watched movies in the UK.

For 1990 and 2000, we used the box-office data reported in the histories of British film –

the British Film Institute’s BFI Film and Television Handbook above all. In the case of a tie, we

went for the more British of the two. For 1980, for example, we selected McVicar over Yanks

because the former was a UK production and the latter a UK-US production. In 2000, in contrast,

we went for the greater box-office popularity of Gladiator, a sword-and-sandal drama directed

by a British filmmaker and delivered in British accents, over Billy Elliot, an identity-rich story of

a coal miner’s son in Northern England who takes up ballet.7 Film histories likewise helped

determine release dates. Whenever we encountered a reasonable rankings tie, we selected the

more recent release: McVicar, released in August 1980, over Yanks, released in September 1979,

for example. For the earlier years, however, we acknowledged that movies released in the

previous year often topped most watched estimates in the following year. In the 1950s, for

instance, showings of popular movies in some cases went on for eighteen consecutive months.

62
Notes

1
For further details, see Srdjan Vucetic, “The United Kingdom, 1950‐2000—Primary Texts,” 23 June 2016. Available

at https://srdjanvucetic.wordpress.com/research/id/srdj‐postwar‐uk‐sources‐final/. We assumed letters to editors

to be genuine.

2
Connolly and Phillips (1989), for example. For further details, see Vucetic (2020a).

3
British interest in translated fiction was, in any case, low throughout.

4
For advice, I am grateful to Professor Shafquat Towheed, director of the Book History Research Group and the UK

Reading Experience Database, the Open University.

5
This is based on Bennett and Woollacott (1987, 26) and Benson (2015, 17). Analyses of Bond as a nationalist, anti‐

declinist fantasy are of course plentiful (e.g., Buettner 2016; Funnell and Dodds 2017). We relied on our own

coding.

6
Neither is to be confused with “the steady longterm sellers” such as the Bible, Tolkien’s three‐volume fantasy The

Lord of the Rings (1954–55), and, arguably, George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). In all cases we selected novels

dealing with contemporary themes. To go with the year 1960 again, we were initially drawn to Lady Chatterley’s

Lover by D.H. Lawrence, a book that sold over 200,000 paperback copies within weeks following the infamous

obscenity trial in November–October of that year. However, this was a Penguin paperback of a book published in

1928. Our runners‐up included John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), which sold well thanks to a lucrative

paperback‐movie tie‐in in 1959; David Storey’s This Sporting Life, which won the 1960 Macmillan Fiction Award;

and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, a novel first published in 1957 that sold well in the tens of thousands due to the

author’s death in 1960 and the story’s cinamatization in 1959, but without quite reaching the numbers of the

Fleming and Christie books.

7
On why Gladiator is a British and not merely “another Hollywood movie,” see Dalby (2008, 443).

63
Appendix B

Events

The rationale for finding events is set out in the introduction of the book.

Figure B.1: Selecting Events

Temporal
proximity

Geographic
Paradigmatic
& thematic
relevance
diversity

UK Defence Reviews, 1957–2003

Sandys, D. 1957. Statement on Defence, 1957. London: Ministry of Defence.

http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/small/cab-129-86-c-57-69-19.pdf.

Healey, D. 1966. Defence Review: The Statement on the Defence Estimates. London: Ministry of

Defence. http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/small/cab-129-124-c-33.pdf.

64
Mason, R. 1975. Statement on the Defence Estimates London: Ministry of Defence.

http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/small/cab-129-181-c-21.pdf.

Nott, J. 1981. The United Kingdom Defence Programme: The Way Forward. London: Ministry

of Defence. http://fc95d419f4478b3b6e5f-

3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.r87.cf1.rackcdn.com/991284B4011C44C9AEB423DA04

A7D54B.pdf.

King, T. 1990. Defence (Options for Change). London: Ministry of Defence.

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1990/jul/25/defence-options-for-change.

Rifkind, M. 1994. Front Line First. London: Ministry of Defence.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199394/cmhansrd/1994-07-14/Debate-1.html.

Hoon, G. 2002. The Strategic Defence Review: A New Chapter. London: Ministry of Defence.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20090805012836/http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet

/AboutDefence/CorporatePublications/PolicyStrategyandPlanning/StrategicDefenceReviewANe

wChaptercm5566.htm.

Hoon, G. 2003. Delivering Security in a Changing World: Defence White Paper. London:

Ministry of Defence.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121018172935/http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/0

51AF365-0A97-4550-99C0-4D87D7C95DED/0/cm6041I_whitepaper2003.pdf.

65
66
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