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Harold Wilson's direction of the second British application to join
the EEC us ripe for reinterpretation. With new and exciting
material now available in the Public Record Office and abroad, this
is an extremely propitious moment to reconsider Wilson's
motivations, and to contextualise them in light of evidence on
foreign policy-making contained in the official record.
Harold Wilson's direction of the second British application to join
the EEC is ripe for reinterpretation. During the period of Wilson's
first Labour administrations, October 1964-April 1966 and April
1966-June 1970, executive policy-making in Britain became legendary
for its supposed opaqueness and intrigue. They are remebered not
least for the volume of scandal and in-fighting among a talented
but reckless group of ministers, numbering among them a
Machiavellian Prime Minister in Wilson, a drunken neurotic in
George Brown, and the highly influential and vocal diarists Tony
Benn, Barbara Castle and Richard Crossman. On top of all this, the
1960s saw a plethora of domestic and foreign-policy crises.
This text offers a refreshing and challenging perspective on the
nature of history by analysing the character, role, functioning and
wider uses of historiography. Taking British policies towards
European integration since World War II as a case study, the author
demonstrates how its interpretation and and reportage over time is
subject to changing trends. Seeking to explain these trends in
terms of the different conceptions of the past which are maintained
by different schools of writing, it forces us to confront the
fundamental difficulties we encounter in undertaking studies in
history. It draws attention to the impact on historical
interpretation of changing times, political discourse, the opening
of archives, and of subjects being brought to the fore by
professional historians. constructing the past and in creating its
narratives. Furthermore, it asserts that historiography is riddled
with politics at all levels and that to write the historian out of
tests is to represent what it entails to write history. In so
doing, it demonstrates how the philosophy of history has a direct
bearing upon the everyday practice of history. thinking about and
understanding history. It should appeal to international
historians, those interested in history as a form of philosophical
inquiry, to students of European integration history and the Cold
War, and to British foreign policy-makers.
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