ABSTRACT
In the decades after 1945, as the Empire dissolved, there was much anguished discussion, at least in some quarters, of the extent to which Britain remained a ‘world power’. ‘We are a world power and a world influence’, Harold Wilson had declared in his Mansion House speech of November 1964, ‘or we are nothing’. A decade later, however, such declarations sounded somewhat hollow. That British Prime Ministers felt obliged to describe matters in such stark terms was itself symptomatic of an inability or an unwillingness to contemplate a more modest but still significant future as an upper-middle-rank European power. This state of mind helps to explain Britain’s difficulties in the Community which we have just considered.
