Introduction

Abstract

Almost all scholars and journalists who have so far written on this topic have tended to see the events of January 1963 as a dramatic climax – Britain’s EEC application. Their work is written from a dominant Anglo-American perspective. Consequently it depicts the breakdown as a carefully planned, intentionally rupturous, and therefore almost evil, Gaullist plot to keep Britain out of Europe and allocate the dominant position therein to France. The British and American governments are usually described as taken by surprise. As the French tactics were successful and Great Britain was left little more than an island off the European shores, others’ accounts stop here.