This thesis examines the limits to Anglo-German antagonism and the sources of rapprochement between Britain and Germany, during the approximate period 1905-1914. It thus explores Anglo-German relations before the First World War from a perspective which has up to now been largely neglected, and serves as a corrective to the emphasis on the sources of antagonism which prevails in the English-language historical literature. The study probes Germanophilism among British non-governmental elites, focusing on the commercial, financial and academic communities, as well as cooperative links between the two countries at the non-governmental level before the war. The topics examined include the Anglo-German friendship movement in Britain, ties between British and German commercial interests and Anglo-German economic interdependence, and Anglo-German links in education. The thesis also studies attitudes, including a discussion of British stereotypical images of Germany based on travel accounts. British textbooks on German history that were published before the war are analysed as well as a means of assessing the prewar attitude of British academics, in particular historians, towards Germany. This investigation reveals the strength of the idea of Anglo-German racial kinship, and demonstrates that British historians tended to view Germany favourably before the war. Their attitude, however, changed after the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. In conclusion, the thesis reappraises the ultimate failure of the 'pro-German' forces in Britain to prevent the outbreak of Anglo-German hostilities in 1914. Its primary aim, nevertheless, is not to argue that the limits to the Anglo-German antagonism could have prevented the First World War, but to demonstrate that they existed and were important.

The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is a highly significant arena for the production of foreign and security policy for all member states and has been the focus of extensive academic examination since its establishment. An important body of literature in this regard has been that which utilises supranationalist theoretical frameworks to understand its development. This seeks to move beyond instrumental or utilitarian understandings of how and why states engage with the CFSP, looking instead at its impact on member states. Their central insight is that the consequence of extended cooperation and interaction is a transformation not only in how states make foreign policy, but in their underlying interests and preferences that underpin their involvement in it. To make this argument, many such analyses have sought to apply the range of conceptual tools offered by constructivism. How they apply constructivism is problematic, however. While the CFSP has facilitated common approaches towards a wide range of policy issues, the supranationalist theoretical literature fails to account adequately either for what is taking place at the national level, or to consider the full range of drivers of interest and preference formation such as history, geopolitics, etc. This thesis argues, therefore, that the application of constructivism within supranationalist theoretical examinations of the CFSP cannot provide a satisfactory framework to explain how and why states interact with the CFSP in the manner that they do. To demonstrate this, the thesis examines how Britain and Germany, representative of two alternative standpoints on the EU and integration, have engaged with the CFSP. Analysing the national traditions, structures and processes that provide the basis for their foreign policy-making, it argues that while constructivism generates important insights into the processes by which policy is made, particularly through the concept of socialization, insufficient attention is paid within supranationalist theoretical analyses to the role of domestic foreign policy regimes as generators of their national interests and preferences. Instead, it contends that we need to employ rationalist interpretations of interest formation and how states organise to pursue these interests if we are to generate an accurate picture of how and why they interact with the CFSP in the way that they do.

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This research examines the meaning and practice of History Workshop as a site of knowledge production and emancipatory politics in Britain and West Germany from the late-1960s to the early-1980s. In this respect, it marks a departure from most secondary accounts that have been written on the movement and associated forms of historical work in both countries, which have tended to separate out intellectual history from the social and cultural histories of protest and activism. The aim of this research is to preserve the interdependence and mutual implication of these two realms, treating them as part of the many-sided political dynamic that energised and directed the activities of the movement. Furthermore, it goes beyond the existing literature by broadening the scope of inquiry to encompass transnational spheres of activity, which includes an investigation of the forms of interaction, exchange and mutual perception between Workshop historians in both countries, along with a focus on the social networks and institutional apparatuses, and the ways in which they connected participants. This approach follows trends in recent scholarship on the history of social movements, where historians have increasingly turned their attention towards the comparative, transnational and global contexts of protest, a trend that is also slowly filtering into other fields like intellectual history and even the subspecialism of the history of historiography.

This thesis examines the limits to Anglo-German antagonism and the sources of rapprochement between Britain and Germany, during the approximate period 1905-1914. It thus explores Anglo-German relations before the First World War from a perspective which has up to now been largely neglected, and serves as a corrective to the emphasis on the sources of antagonism which prevails in the English-language historical literature. The study probes Germanophilism among British non-governmental elites, focusing on the commercial, financial and academic communities, as well as cooperative links between the two countries at the non-governmental level before the war. The topics examined include the Anglo-German friendship movement in Britain, ties between British and German commercial interests and Anglo-German economic interdependence, and Anglo-German links in education. The thesis also studies attitudes, including a discussion of British stereotypical images of Germany based on travel accounts. British textbooks on German history that were published before the war are analysed as well as a means of assessing the prewar attitude of British academics, in particular historians, towards Germany. This investigation reveals the strength of the idea of Anglo-German racial kinship, and demonstrates that British historians tended to view Germany favourably before the war. Their attitude, however, changed after the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. In conclusion, the thesis reappraises the ultimate failure of the 'pro-German' forces in Britain to prevent the outbreak of Anglo-German hostilities in 1914. Its primary aim, nevertheless, is not to argue that the limits to the Anglo-German antagonism could have prevented the First World War, but to demonstrate that they existed and were important.

This thesis presents a three-area local case study of expressions of public opinion and the ‘public mood’ regarding British policy towards Germany and defence preparations. The period covered is November 1937 to September 1939. By using local case studies, which existing scholarship has largely ignored, the thesis adds to the national synthesis of events during this period, thereby allowing a more complete history to emerge. The inclusion of local case studies confirms much of the existing narrative but challenges some of the traditional assumptions on issues such as the level of opposition to appeasement and the changes that had already taken place prior to March 1939, when elite opinion shifted. That shift therefore marked the culmination of a process that had begun over a year earlier. This process had been the result of a series of international crises, which provided the psychological changes required in the mind of the British public to enable the nation to prepare for war, despite the continuing desire to avoid a conflict. By combining an analysis of expressions of opinion towards foreign policy with actions taken as part of defence preparations, the thesis identifies the Munich crisis as the major turning point, but it would require a further crisis before the change could be incorporated into mainstream opinion.