In Greatness and Decline: National Identity and British Foreign Policy, Srdjan Vucetic sets out to understand the foreign policy “problem” that Britain has experienced throughout the second half of the twentieth century, which he defines as “how to pursue a robust global power policy in the face of relative decline” (3). Vucetic takes the decline of Britain as an obvious and incontrovertible fact throughout the book, although how this has been measured or defined is never outlined. More uniquely, Vucetic argues that this was not simply a problem for the political elite, but one that concerned all of British society as, fundamentally, the problem was the persistence of a British sense of “Greatness” (34). Throughout the book it is palpable that Vucetic thinks the idea of Britain as a great power in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is laughable and something that needs explaining, as it so clearly differs from reality. While this may very well be the case, particularly if seen from an international relations, foreign policy, or economic viewpoint, Vucetic's approach offers limited opportunity to understand postwar Britain in a meaningful or nuanced way. The book is organized by decade, with each chapter exploring dominant and challenger discourses about Britishness between 1950 and 2010. Each decade is treated as a separate and unified period of time, and the purpose of dividing British history up in this way is not discussed. Vucetic finds overwhelming consistency in the way that Britishness is articulated throughout these decades, with dominant discourses such as “Modern Britain” making repeated appearances (42, 73, 94–95, 121, 145, 169).

As Vucetic clearly indicates, this is not a history book. While he is using historical “methods, scale, and sensibility” (23), he is doing so in order to “evaluate international relations theory” (xii) rather than to produce any new historical knowledge or understanding of the period. In fact, those looking for a book that provides clear and precise details or contextualization of this period of British history will likely be disappointed. There are a number of inaccuracies and general historical sloppiness throughout the book, which certainly detract from its usefulness for historians. For example, Vucetic uses “Macmillan and Heath” (88) as shorthand to discuss government attitudes in the 1960s, whereas government policy in the 1970s is attributed to “Heath and Wilson” (110). Ted Heath was not elected prime minister until June 1970, and Harold Wilson is mainly remembered for his premiership between 1964 and 1970, although he did briefly serve as prime minister again between 1974 and 1976. Also problematic is that this construction suggests that there were no significant differences between the policies of the two major parties (Wilson was a Labour prime minister while Heath and MacMillan were Conservative prime ministers), a position that historians have generally moved away from since the 1990s (see Michael Kandiah and Harriet Jones, The Myth of Consensus: New Views of British History, 1945–64 [1996]).

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of this book is Vucetic's assertion that the analysis outlines what the British “masses” thought at any particular moment (x, 34). Vucetic makes this claim based on the sources he uses, which, he says, are representative of both elite and popular opinion. He is transparent about the sources selected, outlining them in a table (26) so readers can make their own judgments. The sources selected, according to Vucetic, are biased toward England, and London in particular as this is the “dominant site for discourse production” (27). They are also overwhelmingly male and white. These issues are simply acknowledged at the outset but do not figure in the analysis in subsequent chapters. There is no discussion of how these carefully selected sources may, in fact, produce a particular view of Britishness that was not necessarily universal. Popular films and novels are used as if they simply reflect the views of those who consumed them due to their popularity. There is no engagement with scholarship about the reception of these sorts of materials, nor is there acknowledgment that people might have seen a film or read a book and disagreed with the vision of Britain that it put forward.

Along with these texts, Vucetic also analyzes a series of events that happened during each decade, chosen for their “temporal proximity,” “spatial diversity,” and “paradigmatic relevance” (35). Putting aside the vagueness of this selection process, it is also revealing that even these events only conform to Vucetic's paradigm about half of the time. Those events that do not fit this paradigm are simply labeled “small misfits” (192) and otherwise ignored. In the later chapters in particular, Vucetic acknowledges that the reconstruction of Britishness that he is providing does not explain a number of the key events that he has selected to analyze, but he does not suggest that this may indicate either a flaw with the paradigm that he is putting forward or the events that were selected (152)—or, indeed, that British history might be somewhat more complicated and contradictory than any single paradigm might allow.

While his book does not contribute new ways of thinking about postwar Britain, Vucetic does provide a different set of evidence on which to base existing interpretations. Vucetic's analysis is consistent with existing historiography (179). The use of the Making Identity Count project, which Vucetic describes as a constructivist database of British identity, could be seen to add to the existing evidence base. Vucetic does offer a good overview of dominant trends and highlights key areas of consistency in dominant thinking within Britain about the nation. He is convincing that within Britain ideas about British uniqueness, superiority, exceptionality, and “Greatness’ should not be ignored when trying to understand foreign policy decisions. He hints at the idea that the idea of “Greatness” was “rebranded” at certain points (93), although this is unfortunately not followed up in detail or discussed in relation to other historical moments. This book would be useful for an overview of dominant political ideas about British national identity, but it does not offer much in the way of nuanced understanding of the manner in which these dominant discourses are created or changed over time for particular ends.