Ten years ago, in 1963, de Gaulle had just succeeded in preventing Macmillan’s Britain from joining the EEC, in disregard both of the other members and of the bureaucracy of that organization. Macmillan himself had succeeded with Kennedy at Nassau in contracting for Polaris missiles with which to arm the United Kingdom’s own nuclear submarines. Kennedy’s alleged laurels of the Cuban missile crisis were still fresh, the three thermonuclear powers were negotiating a significant measure of arms control, and a brief era had begun in which it was sensible to regard the United States as the one super power.

The economies in the 1970s were characterized by high inflation and low growth. Labor acquired great power that was used to increase wages and to reduce effort and labor efficiency. This was the beginning of a trend toward opening global markets and globalization. There was an assumption that opening of markets would increase global efficiency and standards of living. Enterprises with “global reach” become important. China joined the global economy at this time. There was significant change in favor of market-based policies and against high taxes and public spending, and the role of the market came to be seen more favorably and that of governments less favorably. There was a view that a free market can do almost anything. Pro-market theories become popular. Political elections were affected in several countries. Globalization left some industrial workers without work and without income and conservative governments were reluctant to assist them. In dealing with this problem, domestic markets work less well than expected from theory, while global financial markets grow significantly. There was the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreements and the growing use of flexible exchange rates.

Chapter 6 examines protest movements in India in the 1970s. It explores how participatory democracy became a key demand of anti-state protest.

The introduction begins by demonstrating the importance of ‘modernisation’ for left-wing debates in the second half of the twentieth century. After recapping the key staging posts of Labour’s trajectory from the 1970s to the 1990s, it then argues that existing histories obscure the diverse meanings and appeal of ‘modernisation’ through their current use of the term. I suggest that this hinders our understanding of both New Labour and many of their left-wing critics, and too readily accepts a teleological reading of history. Following a brief discussion of the method of the book, the introduction touches on the wider historical significance of this revised understanding of Labour’s ideological debates. It questions the idea of an ‘age of neoliberalism’ and introduces other themes of the late twentieth century of comparable significance to market liberalism: the challenge to the nation state from above and below; the rise of post-1968 ‘liberation movements’; deindustrialisation; and constitutional agitation. It ends by outlining the chapters.

This introduction outlines the central argument of this book: diplomacy via cultural and scientific exchange was critically important to the changing relationship between the societies and governments of China and the United States between 1969 and 1978. This argument challenges the established account of Sino-American relations in this period: as determined by summit diplomacy between the top leaders in Washington and Beijing. Instead, this book reveals how a far broader and more diverse cast of Chinese and Americans—athletes, musicians, scientists, and many others—played a central role in the Sino-American rapprochement of the 1970s. Transnational societal contacts were interactively connected to high diplomacy between the US and Chinese governments and these two tracks of Sino-American diplomacy were mutually constitutive. This introduction places this argument in the context of the historiography of US-China relations and provides a sense of the scale and nature of Sino-American cultural and scientific exchange in this period.

This chapter traces the influence of second-wave feminist activism, scholarship, and fiction in the US on women’s fiction of the 1990s. The first half examines a selection of literary texts published between the late 1960s and late 1980s that attest to the innovative techniques that women and genderqueer writers developed in this period to articulate feminist ideas, record the movement’s reception by the public, and recuperate aspects of American history long overlooked by a male-dominated academy. The second half turns to two novels by women published at the twentieth century’s close, both of which move between the 1990s and the previous six decades: Whitney Otto’s How to Make an American Quilt and Paule Marshall’s Daughters. The narrative strategies these novels use to challenge universalist accounts of history are revealed. These two novels featuring female protagonists who abandoned PhD projects dismissed as trivial by their white male supervisors are representative of a broader tendency in women’s fiction of the period, which is best approached as a repository for the historiographic narratives rejected by a white male-dominated academy.

Britain in 1972 was different in many ways to the Britain of 1956. The post-war years of full employment were gone; poverty had been ‘rediscovered’; unemployment was rising; the 1960s had simultaneously seen the emergence of ‘affluence’ and countercultural challenges to it; racism and anti-immigration sentiments were a visible and endemic part of daily life and were slipping into the political mainstream; and Britain had lost most of its empire. And yet the anti-racist politics and radicalism of the 1960s and Britain’s increasingly established Black and Asian populations were showing that there were new ways of being British. This chapter explores how these shifts affected the reception and resettlement of the Ugandan Asians. It shows that the expellees – sometimes treated as ‘refugees’, sometimes as ‘immigrants’ – while welcomed by the government-led Ugandan Resettlement Board and a diverse and energetic voluntary initiative, often faced a Britain experienced by its poorest inhabitants. A place of slum housing, rack-renting landlords, a byzantine welfare system and low pay, intensified for the expellees by institutionalised and casual racism. At the same time grassroots activists, race relations workers and the sustained efforts of the expellees themselves to establish new lives in Britain demonstrated that Britain was also being re-worked from within.

The European Union is sometimes described as a ‘community of values’. Is this adequate? Legally anchored civil and human rights and democratic guarantees were not the foundation upon which institutional cooperation was built. Instead they sneaked in by the back door. Especially in the early days the centrality of values was by no means obvious, and certainly contested. The search for a specific institutional ethos only became significant in the course of the 1970s. Today’s EU was not born as a community of values; instead it grew into one in a fascinating, decades-long process characterised by ambivalence and contradiction. That does not mean that values and norms played no role in earlier stages of the integration process. At the beginning of the 1950s these questions were already hotly debated, and the value-orientation is clearly reflected in the way European integration was very much understood as a contribution to securing peace. To that extent, the European project is actually inconceivable without the values that grounded and legitimised it; values and norms shaped the EC’s institutions and informal practices at very fundamental levels. But without a legally binding framework they initially remained fragile and vulnerable.

By June 1964, Unficyp had done much to contain military action and prevent a recurrence of open fighting. In addition to its traditional military functions, which were meant to deter a resumption of hostilities, it had also performed non-traditional roles: helping to restore public services, including the courts, and assisting trade and commerce by reopening factories and enabling agricultural work to continue. Moreover, it escorted the transportation of food, essential material, and people on the island’s roads, constructed shelters at refugee camps and reduced fortifications across Cyprus. In spite of this good work, however, its presence had not yet stopped communal violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, nor had it made any progress towards disarming civilians.

McEwan’s first three books, the short story collections First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978), and a first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), made him notorious as the author of fictions preoccupied with violence and deviant sexuality. A second longer work, The Comfort of Strangers (1981), similarly features murder and sadomasochistic sex, and all of these works display a closed-in quality that the author later professed to find puzzling. This chapter considers the critical impact of this work, but also its relation to 1970s Britain, its context of production. The work’s focus on adolescent stasis and its several references to the early postwar years reference the political stalemates of the era and the demise of the collective mindset of the early postwar period. These contexts, it is argued, provide an under-recognized frame of reference for the early fiction, in particular its backward-looking helplessness and quotidian ennui.

Chapter 5, “Consulting,” follows public sector planners as they exported their experience around the world. If familiar accounts of 1970s Britain depict a sclerotic economy and polity, this episode attests to an entrepreneurial social democracy; and if conventional readings of these new towns depict them as quintessentially English, this episode reveals the international horizons of British new town planning. The story begins in 1976, when the UN’s Habitat conference recommended that states develop “spatial strategy plans” to manage urban growth, endorsing public sector planning programs that echoed Britain’s new towns. Milton Keynes Development Corporation took the lead in marketing British expertise to states around the world, including Nigeria, Egypt, Thailand, Venezuela, Trinidad & Tobago, and Algeria. Although this outreach promised to open markets to British firms, the Conservative government abruptly terminated these efforts in 1982. Henceforth, British urban planners continued to market their expertise as a model for the world, but in terms that now embraced the priorities of market liberalism.