ABSTRACT
British European policy is passing through a particularly difficult period. Policy has become highly politicized, not for the first time since British accession to the European Community. Parliamentary pressures have become as acute as at any point in the past twenty-five years. There is a sharp contrast between the declared ambition of the Prime Minister to place Britain ‘at the heart of Europe’ and the British government’s startling isolation from its counterparts elsewhere in the EC. This was polarized in March 1994 in the controversy around the issue of enlargement, so long and so consistently a primary goal of British policy, when it seemed that the government’s secondary objective of protecting its opportunities to obstruct unwelcome EC proposals would displace its primary objective of advancing enlargement. The management of policy is dominated by the tones and discourse of ‘high Gaullism’—in its odd British variantand it comes from a government that is at an unprecedentedly low ebb in terms of popular esteem.
