The Impossible Peace

"The Impossible Peace" offers a new interpretation of Britain's policy towards Germany in the years immediatelly following the Second World War, and reassesses the part played by Britain in the collapse of the Grand Alliance and the development of what came to be known as the cold war. After the war Germany became the main battleground and the principal prize in the emerging struggle between East and West. Traditionalist accounts of this period blame the Soviet Union for both the division of Germany and the onset of the Cold War. With the opening of the American archives a new school of historians came forward to challenge this view. What both traditionalists and revisionists have tended to ignore is the crucial role played by Britain. To redress the balance, Anne Deighton re-examines the origins of the Cold War from the British perspective. Using oficial British documents, she traces the course of British foreign policy towards Germany against the background of growing East-West tensions. To achieve four-power harmony in Germany in this new setting was to dream of an impossible peace.
The author argues that Britain in fact took "Western" strategy to contain the genuinely feared threat of Soviet expansionism across Europe. This book sheds new light on personalities and policy-making in the post-war Labour Government. It also reveals the vital role played by Whitehall officials in welding together a foreign policy based on the assumption that Britain could still act as a great power on the world stage.