In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Cold War convention of containment, which undergirded American involvement in Vietnam, was broadly shared, internalized, at times even fostered, by the United States European allies. This consensus broke down by the 1960s, as successive US administrations saw themselves locked ever more rigidly into Cold War logic which seemed to require going to war to preserve a noncommunist South Vietnam. By contrast, the United States transatlantic allies and partners increasingly came to question the very rationale of US intervention. By the mid-1960s there was a remarkable consensus among government officials across Western Europe on the futility of the central objective of the American intervention in Vietnam of defending and stabilizing a noncommunist (South) Vietnam. European governments refused to send troops to Vietnam. However, West European governments differed considerably in the public attitude they displayed toward US involvement in Vietnam, ranging from France’s vocal opposition to strong if not limitless public support by the British and West German governments. Across Western Europe, the Vietnam War cut deeply into West European domestic politics, aggravated political and societal tensions and diminished the righteousness of the American cause.

The most fundamental measure of the global eclipse of Britishness is to be found in the politics of language. The narrowing semantic range of imperial Britishness was epitomized by India’s request for admission into the post-war Commonwealth in 1947 as the first member to adopt a Republican constitution. Resolving this dilemma also raised the question of whether the Commonwealth should retains its customary ‘British’ adjectvie, pressing the ‘British Commonwealth’ to the limit of its capacity to bind an increasingly atomized membership. By the early 1960s, the UK Government itself was inclined to repatriate the meaning of Britishness in official usage to refer only to themselves - itself a major landmark in downsizing the idea of Britain. This chapter traces the protracted diplomatic wrangling over the British name itself in the post-war world, with profound consequences for its future viability.

Under Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog (1924–1939), the state became increasingly central to scientific research and industrialisation. Hendrik van der Bijl and H. J. Van Eck developed national power supply through the state electricity commission (Escom) and used the Industrial Development Council to fund state-led enterprises. State officials and scientists devoted themselves to environmental issues from soil erosion to irrigation, invasive plants and vermin eradication. With Jan Smuts back in power in the war years, competing ‘worlds of possibilities’ emerged in political and scientific imaginations: Anglophone and liberal constituencies looked forward to reforms and postwar reconstruction; the African National Congress focussed on social progress, welfare and human rights for all; Afrikaner nationalists began to envisage an alternative utopia of republican independence and apartheid. The promise of science in helping to deliver these outcomes was expressed by all three political traditions. Improved economic prospects, fuelled by the expansion of gold mining, encouraged urbanisation, state planning, industrial development and social welfare. Science became an arm of an increasingly interventionist state, planning for national postwar reconstruction that envisaged less rigid racial divisions and promised conservation and development in African areas.