The diplomatic foreign relations of the United Kingdom are implemented by the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The UK was the world's foremost power during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Throughout history it has wielded significant influence upon other nations via the British Empire, and until the 1950s was considered a superpower. However, the cost of two World Wars and the process of decolonisation diminished this influence. Nevertheless, the United Kingdom remains a major power and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a Member state of the European Union, and a founding member of the G7, G8, G20, NATO, OECD, WTO, Council of Europe, OSCE, and the Commonwealth of Nations, which is a legacy of the British Empire.
Read more about Foreign Relations Of The United Kingdom: History, Major International Disputes Since 1945, Sovereignty Disputes, Commonwealth of Nations & Ireland, United States, Europe, Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Asia, International Organisations
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“Our poets have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In today’s world parents find themselves at the mercy of a society which imposes pressures and priorities that allow neither time nor place for meaningful activities and relations between children and adults, which downgrade the role of parents and the functions of parenthood, and which prevent the parent from doing things he wants to do as a guide, friend, and companion to his children.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—”indoctrination” we might say—exercised through the mass media.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The masses of the sea
The masses of the sea under
The masses of the infant-bearing sea
Erupt, fountain, and enter to utter for ever
Glory glory glory
The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis’ thunder.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)