Britain: Still looking for that role?

Political Quarterly

Volumn 72, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 366-374

  Barder, Brian ^a  

^a NONE

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Indexed keywords

EID: 0035402722     PISSN: 00323179     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-923X.00396     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. 1 John Coles, Making Foreign Policy, London, John Murray, 2000. Page references to this work are given in the text at the site of quotation.
2. 2 Apparently referring to the period in which Sir John Coles was head of the Diplomatic Service, August 1994 to November 1997.
3. 3 Lord Carrington, Reflect on Things Past: The Memoirs of Lord Carrington, London, Collins, 1988, p. 122.
4. 4 Occurring some time after Sir John Coles had retired from his permanent secretary appointment.
5. 5 For a fuller account of this catalogue of failures, see (e.g.) the present writer's analysis at .
6. 6 e.g. at Chatham House, reported in Financial Times, 4 February 1993.
7. 7 Speech at the Military Academy, West Point, 5 December 1962.
8. 8 NATO demanded at Rambouillet that the Serbs swallow a number of patently unacceptable demands and threatened military action against Belgrade if they refused to accept them; the specific demands to which the Serbs objected most strongly were also unacceptable to the Russians, and NATO's inflexible insistence on them forfeited Russian collaboration and thus any hope of UN endorsement of NATO's subsequent action; yet every one of those demands was dropped, with the apparently enthusiastic agreement of the NATO leaders, from the terms of the settlement eventually accepted by the Serbs after pressure on them by the Russians. The point is elaborated and documented more fully in the present writer's article on the World Wide at .
9. 9 It should be pointed out, though, that it was the political leaders rather than the professional diplomats who were mainly responsible for the Falklands and Suez disasters, whereas it seems likely that the diplomats have to share with the politicians much of the blame for what happened (or did not happen) at Rambouillet.
10. 10 Interestingly, Sir John Coles is reportedly among the group of public figures opposed to British membership of the single currency but in favour of active EU membership.