ABSTRACT
The British contribution to the development of the Cold War has been well documented and is discussed in an earlier chapter of this book. Less noted and commented upon in the literature is the significance of a British role in the development of an East-West Détente. Assessments of the contribution of British diplomacy to moderating East-West conflict in the postwar period have concentrated on the negative side of the record, on the alleged failure of ‘summitry’ in the 1950s, for example, and the evident failure of Macmillan’s Paris summit in 1960. British attempts to mediate between the superpowers have generally been regarded as both ineffectual and pretentious, a rather desperate attempt to prove that Britain could still wield influence on a global stage despite mounting evidence of a material ‘descent from power’. Elizabeth Barker, for example, has argued that the British ‘tended to fall between two stools’ because they weakened the solidarity of the Western alliance by their persistent attempts to mediate, but they were not able to ‘achieve a breakthrough in relations with the Soviet Union’ (Barker, 1971, p. 144).
