Making Foreign Policy: A Certain Idea of Britain

by JohnColes (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $3.35

  Government policy affects everyone. But how good are governments at making policy? What is the process? Is government more about management, efficiency and cost-cutting? Or alternatively, in this age of spin doctors, has presentation taken over as the driving force?;John Coles is the former British senior diplomat and earlier worked as Margaret Thatcher's private secretary and as British High Commissioner in Australia and Ambassador to Jordan. In this work he provides insights on the foreign policy process: how governments have struggled to come to terms with the country's changing circumstances in the second half of the 20th century, how policy is made today, and what foreign policy means at the close of the millennium. He gives his own view of the problems which obstruct good policy and offers his personal solutions. He also considers attempts that have been made to define a role for Britain overseas, arguing that the range and quality of British activity across the globe have much to do with our sense of Britishness. He finds that the Idea of Britain is not as faded as its detractors may like to think.