Retreat from the global? European unity and British progressive intellectuals, 1930-1945

This article sets out to explain how four British progressive thinkers—G.D.H. Cole, Henry Noel Brailsford, Kingsley Martin and Leonard Woolf—came to believe that European unity, and regional integration more broadly, could provide a solution to the economic and political crisis of the 1930s–1940s. Having become increasingly disenchanted with the League of Nations, these authors maintained that only the abandonment of the principle of absolute sovereignty and the establishment of a supranational framework binding countries with similar political and economic institutions could lay foundations for a lasting peace. In retrospect, their work significantly contributed to a more nuanced understanding of economic factors in IR theory and to shift discourses on Britain as a world power away from the centrality of Empire.