Documenting Britain's Foreign Policy

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BY publishing an impressive collection of documents the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Historians have stolen a march on their main overseas competitors. (*) The State Department's long-running series, Foreign Relations of the United States is still securely lodged in the early to mid-1960s, whilst the French Documents Diplomatiques have not advanced that far. Even with more than a hundred documents in each, these first volumes of the FCO's post-1960 series only represent a small selection of government material on Anglo-Soviet relations in the period which became known as the `era of detente'. And it will be several years before other historians, benefiting from releases under the thirty-year rule, will be able to judge just how good the selection is. But both collections provide a wide range of material. Records of international conferences abroad and of ministerial meetings at home, letters from the Moscow Embassy and interviews with the Soviet Ambassador in London, FCO memoranda on individual issues and, perhaps most interestingly, reports by the Joint Intelligence Committee (usually kept secret for far longer than this) are here.

Furthermore the documents cover a wide range of subjects, from the imprisonment of Gerald Brooke (condemned to a labour camp in 1965, for circulating anti-Communist propaganda), through commercial and technological co-operation, to such important international questions as the Vietnam War, Middle East tension and the growing divide between Moscow and Beijing. Volume I, which concentrates on bilateral relations between Britain and the USSR, also includes a number of items on cultural diplomacy, including for example, a report on the `Days of British Music' Festival in Moscow, Leningrad and elsewhere in April 1971, when Benjamin Britten conducted the London Symphony Orchestra and drew enthusiastic crowds.

The change in the atmosphere of East-West relations, as reflected in these documents is remarkable. The first volume …