Abstract
Winston Churchill, Leader of the British Conservative Party in opposition, made his famous ‘three circles’ allusion during a rousing speech to delegates at the Conservative Party Conference in October, 1948, the remarks were made during the period of the Berlin Blockade, in the context of a demand that the UK should take a much stronger stand against the Soviet Union. ‘Nothing stands between Europe today’, he claimed ‘and complete subjugation to Communist tyranny but the atomic bomb in American possession’. He argued that old quarrels with the Germans should now be laid to rest in view of the greater threat to the West, and indeed urged France to lay aside her thousand year quarrel and regain her position in the world by ‘leading back her vanquished enemy into the company and the culture of Christendom and Europe… I cannot think’, he went on,
that the policy of a united Europe as we Conservatives conceive it can be the slightest injury to our British Empire and Commonwealth, or to the principles of imperial preference… Both are vitally and urgently necessary to our Commonwealth, to Europe and to the free world as a whole. As I look out upon the future of our country in the changing scene of human destiny I feel the existence of three great circles among the free nations and democracies. The first for us is naturally the British Commonwealth and Empire with all that comprises.
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Notes
A. Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary, 1945–1951, Heinemann, 1983.
O. S. Franks, Britain and the Tide of World Affairs, Oxford University Press, 1955, p. 3.
F. Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers, Heinemann, 1961, p. 171.
A. Adamthwaite, ‘Overstretched and Overstrung: Eden, the Foreign Office and the Making of Policy, 1951–5’, International Affairs, vol. 64, 1988.
R. M. Hathaway, Ambiguous Partnership: Britain and America, 1944–1947, Columbia University Press, 1981.
J. Edwards, ‘Roger Makins: “Mr. Atom”‘, in J. Zametica (ed.), British Officials and British Foreign Policy, 1945–50, Leicester University Press, 1990.
A. Nutting, Europe Will Not Wait: A Warning and a Way Out, Hollis & Carter, 1960, p. 31.
A. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–51, Methuen, 1984.
See in particular, R. Bullen, ‘Britain and Europe, 1950–57’, in E. Serra (ed.), The Relaunching of Europe and the Treaties of Rome, Bruylant, 1989, p. 330 ff.
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© 1995 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Deighton, A. (1995). Britain and the Three. In: Varsori, A. (eds) Europe 1945–1990s. Southampton Studies in International Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23689-3_12
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