From summer 1950 to summer 1961, the UK was resolutely against joining the institutions of the emerging European Community. Many explanations of this stance have been offered. The prevalent one is that Britain's determination to play the role of a great power excluded it from membership of any organization whose ultimate objective was a European federation. Paradoxically, of all the countries outside the European Communities, the UK was the most closely linked to them.

This book--for which all official records were made freely available to the author--resolves this paradox by rejecting the conclusion that Britain believed it would be able to preserve its great-power status. Instead, it sees post-war decisions about Britain's part in a united Europe as having been governed by a national strategy, formed over the years 1945-50, which rested on a broad consensus of party-political and public support and was intended to effect Britain's transition from great-power status to that of a middle-ranking power. This strategy depended on using Britain's inherited, temporary, post-war advantages as bargaining counters to achieve that transition without endangering the security of its people or their relatively high level of prosperity and comfort.

The first of these objectives was successfully achieved; the second less so, in part because events in western Europe increased inherent disharmonies within the strategy. British policies towards the emergent European Communities remained nevertheless determined by this national-strategic synthesis, not by delusions of grandeur, dislike or suspicion of their European neighbours, sentimental attachment to the Commonwealth or by subservience to the USA.

The Rise and Fall of a National Strategy, 1945-1963, Volume I of the Official History of the United Kingdom and the European Community, traces the gradual failure of the British strategy and the decision of the Macmillan government in summer 1961 to try to rescue it through an application to join the European Communities. The rejection of that application marked the end of that strategy, leaving Harold Wilson's first Labour government with no viable policy towards the Communities other than to join them but with no evident means of achieving that aim.