Finding Britain's place in the 'New World Order': foreign policy in the Thatcher and Major governments at the end of the Cold War

This project will examine British foreign policy in the final years of the Cold War and its aftermath, using recently-released archival material to shed new light on a period which remains highly politicised and poorly understood. It will ask:

1. What did Britain seek to accomplish in the final period of the Cold War, and to what extent did the Thatcher and Major governments achieve those aims?

2. What efforts were made by these governments to reorient Britain towards a post-Cold War political environment, and to what extent were they successful?

Britain's significance in this period is undeservedly under-studied, and new methodological developments in diplomatic history are yet to be reflected in the scholarship. While older accounts privilege superpower-centric narratives, newer works have 'internationalised' the discussion but left Britain behind. For example, Bozo (2008) emphasises the Franco-German role and Albers and Chen (2017) examine Chinese contributions, but there is a dearth of work on Britain's objectives, constraints, and place.

Methodologically, Service (2015) and Brown (2020) build on the growing 'emotional turn' in diplomatic history by discussing the significance of personal relations in late-Cold War diplomacy and the emotional context therein, but Britain is considered only at its intersections with the superpowers. My project unifies these two trends, internationalising these events by examining them from the British perspective while applying a modern methodology which accounts for important emotional factors.

Britain's marginalisation in the scholarship stems from a current of 'declinism', where a paucity of archival material has given rise to simplistic narratives of deteriorating influence. Tomlinson (2016) argues that the disproportionate influence of 'politicized and polemical discourses' overshadows a more multifaceted examination of Britain's impact, but an opportunity to challenge this position has arisen as a large amount of archival material from this period has recently become available.

New FCO and Prime Minister's Office material will underpin this project, and Churchill College, Cambridge, hosts papers from key figures alongside their BDOH Programme which includes interviews with diplomatic officials. Newly available US documents on the Anglo-American relationship are found in the Reagan/Bush Libraries, the National Security Archive and the National Archives, and many are available digitally via the USDDO programme.

This project may also represent the last opportunity to collect oral history from key figures such as Major, Hurd and Rifkind, and their reflections offer irreplaceable insight.

I plan to work on UK-based sources in the first year (2022-23) and visit the US in the second year (2023- 24). The rising availability of digitised sources allows for flexibility: online resources can be prioritised if COVID-19 becomes an impediment to in-person research, with the US trip delayed to 2024-25.

This project will re-evaluate our current understanding of the Thatcher government's place in the latter years of the Cold War and provide the first in-depth examination of the Major government's role in its culmination, challenging the cultural construction of these turbulent times. By offering a new and nuanced perspective on the recent past, it will give invaluable insight to the makers of foreign policy today.