In 1946 Winston Churchill identified the circles of Europe and America as two of Britain’s most important external relationships, empire being the third and, in Churchill’s view, still the highest priority. In the decades that followed, empire shrank in significance, and Britain suffered both absolute and relative decline in its political and economic standing. In the post-imperial twilight America and Europe became ever more central to British policy and to the British political imagination. During the Thatcher years there was a significant reconfiguration of these two relationships, which had lasting consequences. These reconfigurations were in part reactive, coming about through responses to particular events as well as changed circumstances in security and political economy, and often reflected institutional and policy shifts. But they also came about through significant political interventions and political choices, the positive re-imagining of territorial space and territorial relationships, and in particular the great transnational spaces of Europe and Anglo-America in which Britain had been so intimately involved for so long.

In this as in many other fields those who identified themselves as adherents of Margaret Thatcher and the new thinking in the Conservative Party did not have a preconceived idea of the changes they wanted to see. The positions that came to be labelled Thatcherite in the 1990s emerged gradually as a result of the political choices that Thatcher and some of her closest colleagues made first in opposition and later in government. At the outset the positions were much less precise than they were subsequently to become, but by the end of the Thatcher government a relatively clear choice had emerged over whether Britain should give greater priority to its relationship with Europe or with America, and the label ‘Thatcherite’ had become firmly attached to the American option. The choice between Europe and America, despite some protesting that no choice had to be made, had once again become one of the great dividing lines in British politics, both between parties and within parties, and had divided the original Thatcherites themselves into Eurosceptics and Europhiles.