IISS — The First Thirty Years: A General Overview

Abstract

Thirty years have passed since the first annual conference of the ISS (as it then was) assembled in Oxford in 1959 to consider the problems of ‘Independence within NATO’. But the Institute had in fact been conceived at an earlier conference which had met in this town of Brighton two years earlier in January 1957; and the convening of that conference was the outcome of discussions which had been going on for most of 1956. It is worth considering for a moment what those discussions were about, and what the original founders of the Institute had in mind, before we go on to ask how successful we have been in carrying out their intentions.