Suchergebnisse

The pursuit of stability drove British foreign policy even before 1865. These papers assess the implications of such a policy during the following 100 years when Britain slid from being the only global power to a regional European state.

This volume deals with aspects of British foreign policy from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the Cold War in keeping with the scholarship of Dr Zara Steiner, to whom the book is offered as a tribute. The contributors are all well-established experts in the study of diplomacy and foreign policy, and their essays cover a wide variety of themes, from the influence of ambassadors on British foreign policy to the relations between Britain and the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1948. The book thus covers the half century from Britain's pre-eminent position as a world power at the end of the nineteenth century to her relative 'decline' during and after the Second World War

It is possible to identify two general descriptive applications of the term "balance of power" that affected British policymaking in the years following the WWI. These two applications reflected simplistic historical interpretations of the European States System in the period before 1914 & GB's role in it. One application of the term was pejorative & associated with the discredited system of pre-1914 Great Power diplomacy. The second application stemmed from a more a positive assessment of GB's prewar diplomacy, seeing it as the traditional goal of preventing the domination of the European continent by a single power. The purpose of this article is to examine both uses of the expression balance of power & demonstrate how they influenced the direction of British diplomacy in the interwar period. Adapted from the source document.