This book examines the outcome of the British commitment to reconstitute a sovereign Polish
state and establish a democratic Polish government after the Second World War. It analyses the
wartime origins of Churchill¿s commitment to Poland and assesses the reasons for the collapse
of British efforts to support the leader of the Polish opposition Stanis¿aw Miköajczyk in
countering the attempt by the Polish communist party to establish one-party rule after the war.
This examination of Anglo-Polish relations is set within the broader context of emerging early
Cold War tensions. It addresses the shift in British foreign policy after 1945 towards the US
the Soviet Union and Europe as British leaders and policymakers adjusted both to the new
post-war international circumstances and to the domestic constraints which increasingly
limited British policy options. This work analyses the reasons for Ernest Bevin¿s decision to
disengage from Poland helping to advance the debate on the larger question of Bevin¿s vision
of Britain¿s place within the newly reconfigured international system. The final chapter
surveys British policy towards Poland from the period of Sovietisation in the late 1940s up to
the October 1956 revolution arguing that Poland¿s process of liberalisation in the mid-1950s
served as the catalyst for limited British reengagement in Eastern Europe.
