ABSTRACT
In the course of their political careers, spanning from 1945 to the early 1990s, Enoch Powell and Julian Amery grappled with the changing international position of the United Kingdom – involving rapid decolonization, European integration and a close, but sometimes fraught, relationship with the United States. From 1979, Powell even began to argue that Britain and the Soviet Union should form some kind of international alliance as a counterbalance to what he saw as the growing alignment between the United States and China. The Suez agreement showed decisively that Britain was no longer able or willing – there is no real difference – to maintain that world system at one of its vital points, if that meant the exertion of force. By the early 1960s Powell was calling for a more determined move away from empire and a more tightly defined international role for Britain, with its defence priorities in Europe.
