ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses how the British policy process has dealt with some of the major foreign policy issues facing the country in the postwar world. After outlining the foreign policy agenda, it analyzes how the British policy process has functioned in formulating foreign policy, what the outcomes have been, how goals and performance have matched, and whose views are reflected in the outcomes. Britain's role in the European Union is an issue that has moved over the years from an almost exclusively elite concern to one that has engaged broader sections of the population. The continuing racial apartheid in South Africa, a former British colony, was a particular flashpoint for Commonwealth conflict. British governments were anxious to limit their involvement to moral condemnation. The British developed their own nuclear weapons in executive secrecy under both the Labour and Conservative governments, making them the third-ranked nuclear power in the world after the United States and the Soviet Union.
