ABSTRACT
THE preceding chapters have given an outline of Britain’s relations with the new international institutions of the period. It must be remembered that this account is far from being adequate to cover the whole of the burden that fell upon the British machinery for conducting external relations. A great deal of the time and energy of the Government was spent on conducting relations arising out of the ‘cold war’ and out of related crises in the Far East and Middle East. Public opinion all the time, and Government opinion for most of the time, was necessarily far more alive to issues of this kind with the immense dangers they implied. The division which is convenient for the purpose of analysis cannot be applied to the responsible ministers or to the principal ofU39als who served them. And, of course, the major events in world politics helped to produce the climate of opinion in which decisions in our more limited U5<4 were made. Finally, these were important years in the testing of the institutions of the United Nations and it was only the failures of these universalist bodies that made for concentration upon the more limited objectives of greater co-operation or co-ordination in the European and Atlantic worlds.
