| Summary: | "As Britain begins to confront the new challenges of the post-Brexit era, it is timely to re-examine the nature and causes of British foreign policy after World War II. Srdjan Vucetic contends that Britain's tenacious search for a global power role was never simply a function of a certain elite-level culture or consensus. Rather, it developed from mainstream, gradually evolving ideas about "who we are" circulating within British and more specifically English society as a whole. Greatness and Decline builds on Making Identity Count, a project to assemble a constructivist database of national identities for the use in International Relations and in social sciences and humanities more generally. Political speeches, newspapers, history textbooks, novels, and movies help the author reconstruct the content and contestations of Britishness across colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods. He then uses this analysis to shed new light on the kingdom's interactions with the rest of the world. This book will appeal to those who wish to know how and why exceptionalist ideas have for so long influenced British foreign policy. It will also appeal to those interested in possible new directions for Britain in an increasingly unstable world."--
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