A mellifluous but inadequate critique of British foreign policy since 1956, marshalling events toward the conclusion that the UK’s leaving the European Union will have been disastrous. ‘The vital missing ingredient was a framework – a grand strategy, as foreign policy practitioners would call it – grounded in a realistic appraisal of the reach of a middle-ranking power’ (p. 424). Stephens favors macroeconomic and foreign-policy convention (‘how it’s done’), as befits excellent sourcing, but is careless of historical evaluation and glosses matters of political legitimacy such as Parliamentary sovereignty and the common law.

As early as 1945 The Foreign Office concluded Britain would have to be a European power in order to remain a world leader. Postwar Germany wanted low industrial tariffs and France agricultural subsidies, but England hadn’t defined its continental objectives, being preoccupied with Labor’s extension of the welfare state and balance-of-payments problems. In 1950, Robert Schuman gave England but one day to accept the principles of the proto-European Coal and Steel community. The UK missed another chance in declining to participate in 1955’s Messina conference, wrangling with the choice of Europe or Atlanticism.

Pretensions of independent status, or at least a balanced special relationship, were shattered by the Suez crisis. (In withdrawing US support, Eisenhower covered his desire for smooth re-election and recent withdrawal of Aswan dam financing with anti-colonial rhetoric. But why look past Hungary?) MacMillian persuaded Kennedy to allow the UK a semi-independent nuclear capability, which the prime minister saw as insurance against the possibility of US withdrawal from NATO. It came with the cost of maintaining otherwise unneeded bases east of Suez, thereby reducing other conventional forces, as England continued to struggle with balance of payments and devaluation. Ties were subsequently strained by England’s declining to participate in Vietnam. In all the UK was clearly the supplicant, Atlanticism was never a real alternative.

DeGaulle’s first veto was premised on Commonwealth (i.e., Caribbean and Antipodean foodstuffs); the second deferred to Jean Monnet’s acquis communautaire, an accumulation of diplomatic compromises which the UK could not be allowed to unwind, even though his own Europe de patries was more aligned with England’s preference for a moderate pace of integration.

In 1971, Ted Heath, the Conservatives’ only truly European leader, succeeded by allowing his party a free vote, prompting Labor to follow suit. Jenkins led the rebellion against Wilson, and the vote passed by a clear margin of 112. Thatcher, a ‘leader in search of enemies’ (among other journalistic jibes gratuitous in the longer-term context), is said to be European after all by dint of her 1988 Bruges address. In fact Stephens himself shows she was directly opposing Jacques Delors’ progress toward Maastricht. Blair then abandoned Thatcher’s Maastricht opt-outs for social legislation and the common law.

Stephens cites a Whitehall mandarin’s observation (p. 294) that the EU was becoming a three-leg stool: integration driven by the Paris-Berlin axis, competition by the Berlin-London tie, and defense-diplomacy by Paris-London – notwithstanding Paris having left NATO and his narrative’s course runs the other direction. England had consistently missed opportunities, and more generally been unsure of its post-imperial identity. Thus Cameron’s 2015 plebiscite (as well as 2011’s Sovereign Grant Act) was adjudged by Merkel (and Stephens) to have appeased England’s Euroskeptics.

Stephens accepts projections of economic losses as definitive as well as superordinate to political concerns, whether those of the electorate or those which are structural, such as Parliamentary supremacy or the common law’s conflict with Brussels-made civil law. ‘…The reality was that free trading arrangements relied to a much greater degree on regulatory alignment and share standards and norms’, he writes on p. 394. He bemoans another Tory split’s devastation of England, as over the 19th-century Corn Laws or 20th-century imperial trade preferences, as if the party were not honestly wrestling with the matter, as if the party’s sole purpose were power but not principle. Other arguments are adduced to deride the decision, such as the reopening of Irish border questions following the 1998 Good Friday agreement.