The ''Great Retreat'' and the Politics of Indifference: British International Theory and the End of Empire, 1945-1975.

The subject of empire was a prominent theme in British writing on the theory of international politics during the inter-war years, from Alfred Zimmern's The Third British Empire (1926) to Lionel Curtis' Civitas Dei (1938). In these works and many others, the British Empire and Commonwealth was conceived as a model for a new diplomacy, as a template for a new world order. Even as late as 1943 the veteran General Smuts spoke to the Empire Parliamentary Association of the Commonwealth as a unique example of how sovereign states might transcend the pressure of international anarchy and co-operate in peace, a mode of association he thought should be extended to Western Europe. In the post-war years, this enthusiasm for the imperial project diminished with marked speed. By the 1960s, British 'indifference' to Empire and Commonwealth was the subject of much comment; indeed, some, like Lord Franks, went so far as to argue that decolonisation and the troubles of the Commonwealth project were as much the result of 'weariness of the flesh, with no adventure, no inspiration in it, nothing positive, only an endless negative' as any other external pressure ('The Great Retreat is Nearly Over', Sunday Times, 26 April 1964, quoted in W. M. Medlicott's British Foreign Policy since Versailles, 1919-1963, p. 345). The failure of will, rather than the 'wind of change', was to blame. This paper, a contribution to the intellectual history of International Relations, re-examines this politics of 'indifference' to Empire and its wider effect upon British writing on international politics from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1970s. It explores the work of a range of British thinkers, from Martin Wight to Hugh Seton-Watson and F. S. Northedge, who sought to re-shape the study of international relations in the aftermath of the failure of inter-war internationalism and the war. It contends that the demise of the tradition of liberal imperialism, exemplified by the work of Margery Perham, and its legacies, notably a lingering antipathy to nationalism - 'a political concept without a logical basis', as C. E. Carrington called it in his inaugural lecture as Abe Bailey Professor of British Commonwealth Relations in 1955 - and to the principles of national self-determination and state-sovereignty. These legacies, it is argued, helped to inoculate British international theorists to the statist power-politics of 'realism'. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]