Concert of the World: Early British Efforts to Articulate a Post-War Grand Strategy, 1939-1942

ABSTRACT This essay examines in detail the early years of British planning for a post-war security policy. The first years of the war saw British statesmen and officials consumed by concerns over the military conflict and hesitant to commit the government to specific war aims. This tendency changed by 1940 and 1941, due largely to fears that a failure to counter German propaganda about a ‘new order’ for Europe would lead European populations to accept Nazi designs for future economic and political order on the continent. Though there was an active, if amorphous, debate taking place within Britain about the future international order and Britain’s place within, there remained a lack of concrete policy development. The Atlantic Charter, while a profound moment in hindsight, was not exactly viewed as such by British officials at that time. The true strategic re-direction came in the summer of 1942, when the Foreign Office produced its ‘Four Power Plan’. Though the subject of heated debate in the autumn of 1942, the policy recommendation was eventually accepted in principle by the British Cabinet and would go on to define Britain's grand strategy for the remainder of the war.