This book offers an original interpretation of Britain’s relationship with Europe over a 25 year period: 1959-84 and advances the argument that the current problems over EU membership resulted from much earlier political machinations. This evidence based account of the seminal period analyses the applications for EEC membership, the 1975 referendum, and the role of the press. Was the British public misled over the true aims of the European project? How significant was the role of the press in changing public opinion from anti, to pro Common Market membership? Why, after over 40 years since Britain became a member of the European community, does the issue continue to deeply divide not only the political elite, but also the British public? These, and other pertinent questions are answered in this timely book on a subject that remains topical and highly controversial.

This is the first book to examine Britain’s geopolitical identity and how it is expressed in foreign policy discourse. It demonstrates how British imperial thought, related to its island status, has remained important for British Members of Parliament in their debates of contemporary issues. It presents an exciting and provocative new reading of modern British foreign policy that decentres traditional notions of rationalism and pragmatism by foregrounding the much-neglected aspects of identity and geopolitical space. As British foreign policy-makers wrestle with how to define Britishness outside of the EU, this analysis provides a fresh perspective. It presents a much-needed historical contextualisation of long-standing concepts such as insularity from Europe and a universal aspect on world affairs. This book will be highly relevant for students, researchers and professionals that are seeking to understand British foreign policy. It will be of interest to those researching and working within geopolitics, identity, sociology, foreign policy analysis and international relations.

Britain's vote to leave the European Union in the summer of 2016 came as a shock to many observers. But writers had long been exploring anxieties and fractures in British society – from Euroscepticism, to immigration, to devolution, to post-truth narratives – that came to the fore in the Brexit campaign and its aftermath. Reading these tensions back into contemporary British writing, Kristian Shaw coins the term Brexlit to deliver the first in-depth study of how writers engaged with these issues before and after the referendum result. Examining the work of over a hundred British authors, including Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ali Smith, as well as popular fiction by Andrew Marr and Stanley Johnson, Brexlit explores how a new and urgent genre of post-Brexit fiction is beginning to emerge.

This book is an historical examination of the impact short-term political expediency played in the positions adopted by members of Britain's political elites in the debates over Europe. It advances the argument that many MPs failed to consider the long-term implications of membership.

Substantially revised and updated, this textbook continues to provide the best introduction currently available on the British Political Party system, explaining the history, structure, actors and policies of both the main political parties and the minor parties.

This book focuses on the selection process of cabinet ministers in a variety of democratic political systems. It discusses the variety of recruitment patterns in some of parliament-centered systems, federal system, centralized system, one-party-dominant system and majoritarian system.

Swaziland—recently renamed Eswatini—is the only nation-state in Africa with a functioning indigenous political system. Elsewhere on the continent, most departing colonial administrators were succeeded by Western-educated elites. In Swaziland, traditional Swazi leaders managed to establish an absolute monarchy instead, qualified by the author as benevolent and people-centred, a system which they have successfully defended from competing political forces since the 1970s. This book is the first to study the constitutional history of this monarchy. It examines its origins in the colonial era, the financial support it received from white settlers and apartheid South Africa, and the challenges it faced from political parties and the judiciary, before King Sobhuza II finally consolidated power in 1978 with an auto-coup d’état. As Hlengiwe Dlamini shows, the history of constitution-making in Swaziland is rich, complex, and full of overlooked insight for historians of Africa.