ABSTRACT
The opening of the postwar archives stimulated a number of studies in the 1980s which focused on the British role in what is now referred to as the ‘first’ cold war. Using newly available documentary sources, British and some American scholars argued persuasively that the cold war was not exclusively a Soviet-American affair; Britain, too, played a leading role.1 This confirmation of a significant British role in the early postwar period, however, serves to highlight the absence of general analyses of the British contribution to East-West relations since 1945 and assessments of the British contribution to East-West détente in particular. To date, those scholars who have touched on Britain’s contribution to moderating East-West conflict have tended to concentrate on the negative side of the record-on the alleged failure of Britain’s enthusiastic advocacy of ‘summitry’ in the 1950s, for example. In general, British attempts to act as a mediator or ‘honest broker’ between East and West have been regarded as both ineffectual and pretentious, a rather desperate effort to prove that Britain could still wield influence on a global stage despite mounting evidence of a material ‘descent from power’.2
