COURSE MATERIAL REVIEW

-178 A READER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL THEORY h d' 'ty between the develop·

there be under ~apitalism to d ovtc~;,;~~ufati~::; capital on the one side,

~nne;:h~f ::~,~~~t~vr'c~~~~~:::nd tspeheres of influence for finance capital on the

other?

.;

.,

- W,yf,,,._.) I If,)

Source: E.H. Carr (1939) The Twenty Years' Crisis. London, Macmillan, pp. 67-71 and 75-88. Copyright E.H. Carr, reproduced by permission of Chris Brown ltd, London.

Following the carnage of the Great War of 1914-18, academics and statespeople had operated on the assumption that only the insane would resort to war in the future. Wars were caused in some way by a series of errors, misunderstandings or misperceptions. In future the security of the world could be assured by creating international organizations like the League of Nations that would pro- vide a forum for mediation, clarification and the resolution of conflicts. Carr attacks this view as utopian. He argues that all appeals to a 'harmony of interests' or some 'cosmopolitan' idea of a universal community of humankind should be seen for what they really are: an attempt to dominate by promoting one's own views as though in the interests of all.

THE RELATIVITY OF THOUGHT

The outstanding achievement of modern realism, however, has been to reveal, not merely the determinist aspects of the historical process, but the relative and pragmatic character of thought itself. Jn the last fifty years, thanks mainly though not wholly to the influence of Marx, the principles of the historical school have been applied to the analysis of thought; and the foundations of n

·• new science have been laid, principally by German thinkers, under the name of the 'sociology of knowledge.' The realist has thus been enabled to demonstrate

-180 A READER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL THEORY / that the intellectual theories and ethical standards of utopianism, far from being

( the expression of absolute and a priori principles, a:e historical! conditioned, J being both ~ducts of circumstances and interests an weapons framed for the

furtherance of interests. 'Ethical notions, as Mr Bertrand Russell has remarked, 'are very seldom a cause, but almost always an effect, a means of claiming universal legislative authority for our own preferences, not, as we fondly imagine, the actual ground of those preferences.'1 This is by far the most for· midable attack which utopianism has to face; for here the very foundations of its belief are undermined by the realist critique.

In a general way, the relativity of thought has long been recognised. As early as the seventeenth century Bishop Burnet expounded the relativist view as cogently, if not as pungently, as Marx:

As to the late Civil Wars, 'tis pretty well known what notions of govern- ment went current in those days. When monarchy was to be subverted we knew what was necessary to justify the fact; and then, because it was con· venient for the purpose, it was undoubtedly true in the nature of things that government had its original from the people, and the prince was only their trustee .... But afterwards, when monarchy took its place again ... another notion of government came into fashion. Then government had its original entirely from God, and the prince was accountable to none but Him .... And now, upon another turn of things, when people have a liberty to speak out, a new set of notions is advanced; now passive obe· dience is all a mistake, and instead of being a duty to suffer oppression, 'tis a glorious act to resist it: and instead of leaving injuries to be redressed by God, we have a natural right to relieve ourselves.2

In modern times, the recognition of this phenomenon has become fairly general. 'Belief, and to speak fairly, honest belief', wrote Dicey of the divisions of opinion in the nineteenth century about slavery, 'was to a great extent the result not of argument, not even of direct self-interest, but of circumstances .... Circum· stances are the creators of most men's opinions. '3 Marx narrowed down this somewhat vague conception, declaring that all thought was conditioned by the economic interest and social status of the thinker. This view was perhaps unduly restrictive. In particular Marx, who denied the existence of 'national' inter~sts, underestimated the potency of nationalism as a force conditioning the thought of the individual. But the peculiar concentration which he applied to the princi· pie served to popularise it and drive it home. The relativity of thought to the interests and circumstances of the thinker has been far more extensively recognised and underst0od since Marx wrote.

The principle has an extremely wide field of application. It has become a com- monplace to say that theories do not mould the course of events, but are invented

1. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1915-161 p. 302. 2. Burnet, E.uay upo11 Govermnent, p, 10. 3. Dicey, Law and Opinion (1905 ed.), p. 27.

.. ·~ '

CARR - 181 to explain them. 'Empire precedes imperialism.'' Eighteenth-century England 'put into practice the policy of laissez-faire before it found a justification, or even an apparent justification, in the new doctrine';5 and 'the virtual break-up of /aissez1aire as a body of doctrine ... has followed, and not preceded, the decline of laissez-faire in the real world'.6 The theory of 'socialism in a single country' promulgated in Soviet Russia in 1924 was manifestly a product of the failure of Soviet regimes to establish themselves in other countries.

But the development of abstract theory is often influenced by events which have no essential connexion with it at all.

In the story of political thought [writes a modern social thinker] events have been no less potent than arguments. The failure and success of institutions, the victories and defeats of countries identified with certain principles have repeatedly brought new strength and resolution to the adherents or opponents of these principles as the case might be in all lands .... Philosophy as it exists on earth is the word of philosophers who, authority tells us, suffer as much from toothache as other mortals, and are, like others, open to the impression of near and striking events and to the seductions of intellectual fashion.7

Germany's dramatic rise to power in the sixties and seventies of the last century was impressive enough to make the leading British philosophers of the next generation - Caird, T.H. Green, Bosanquet, McTaggart - ardent Hege!ians. Thereafter, the Kaiser's telegram to Kruger and the German naval programme spread the conviction among British thinkers that Hegel was a less good phi- losopher than had been supposed; and since 1914 no British philosopher of repute has ventured to sail under the Hegelian flag. After 1870, Stubbs and Free- man put early English history on a sound Teutonic basis, while even in France Fustel de Coulanges had an uphill struggle to defend the Latin origins of French civilisation. During the past thirty years, English historians have been furtively engaged in making the Teutonic origins of England as inconspicuous as possible.

Nor is it only professional thinkers who are subject to such influences. Popular opinion is not less markedly dominated by them. The frivolity and immorality of French life was an established dogma in nineteenth-century Britain, which still remembered Napoleon. 'When 1 was young', writes Mr Bertrand Russell, 'the French ate frogs and were called "froggies", but they apparently abandoned this practice when we concluded our entente with them in 1904 - at any rate, 1 have never heard it mentioned since that date.' 8 Some years later, 'the gallant little Jap' of I 905 underwent a converse metamorphosis into 'the Prussian of the East'. In the nineteenth century, it was a commonplace ofBritish opinion that Germans were efficient and enlightened, and Russians backward and barbarous. About

4. J.A. Hobson, Frl!l! Thougl,t in tht Social Scitnces, p. 190. S. HaUvy, Thi! Growth of PhilosopMt: Radit:alism (Engl. transl.), p. 104. 6, M. Dobb. Politkaf Economy 1md Cttpitalism, p. 188. 7. LT. Hobhoust, Tht Uniryof WtsUrn Civilisation, ed. F.S. Marvin (3rd c-d.)1 pp. 177-8. 8. Bertrand Russell, Which Way P1tt1t:d p. 158,

-182 A READER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL THEORY 1910, it was ascertained that Germans (who turned out to be mostly Prussians) were coarse, brutal and narrow-minded, and that Russians had a Slav soul. The vogue of Russian literature in Great Britain, which set in about the same time, was a direct outcome of the political rapprochement with Russia. The vogue of Marxism in Great Britain and France, which began on a modest scale after the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, rapidly gathered momentum, par- ticularly among intellectuals, after 1934, when it was discovered that Soviet Russia was a potential military ally against Germany. It is symptomatic that most people, when challenged, will indignantly deny that they form their opi- nions in this way; for as Acton long ago observed, 'few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas'. 9 The conditioning of thought is necessarily a subconscious process.

~al in~e!e_s!_a~cUhe.universaLgo_o_d_

The realist should not, however, linger over the infliction of these pin-pricks through chinks in the utopian defences. His task is to bring down the whole card- board structure of utopian thought by exposing the hollowness of the material out of which it is built. The weapon of the relativity of thought must be used to demolish the utopian concept of a fixed and absolute standard by which policies and actions can be judged. If theories are revealed as a reflexion of prac- tice and principles of political needs, this discovery will apply to the fundamental theories and principles of the utopian creed, and not least to the doctrine of the harmony of interests which is its essential postulate.

It will not be difficult to shew that the utopian, when he preaches the doc· trine of the harmony of interests, is innocently and unconsciously adopting Walewski's maxim, and clothing his own interest in the guise of a universal interest for the purpose of imposing it on the rest of the world. 'Men come easily to believe that arrangements agreeable to themselves are beneficial to others', as Dicey observed;'" and theories of the public good, which turn out on inspection to be an elegant disguise for some particular interest, are as common in interna- tional as in national affairs. The utopian, however eager he may be to establish an absolute standard, does not argue that it is the duty of his country, in confor- mity with that standard, to put the interest of the world at large before its own interest; for that would be contrary to his theory that the interest of all coincides with the interest of each. He argues that what is best for the world is best for his country, and then reverses the argument to read that what is best for his country is best for the world, the two propositions being, from the utopian standpoint, identical; and this unconscious cynicism of the contemporary utopian has proved a far more effective diplomatic weapon than the deliberate and self-conscious cynicism of a Walewski or a Bismarck. British writers of the

9. Acton, llistury of Freedom, p. 62, 10. Dicey, Law and Opif1ion in Eng{and(lnd ed.), pp. 14-tS. '

CARR 183

past half-century have been particularly eloquent supporters of the theory that the maintenance of British supremacy is the performance of a duty to mankind. 'If Great Britain has turned itself into a coal-shed and blacksmith's forge', remarked The Times ingenuously in 1885, 'it is for the behoof of mankind as well as its own.' 11 The following extract is typical of a dozen which might be culled from memoirs of public men of the period:

I have but one great object in this world, and that is to maintain the greatness of the Empire. But apart from my John Bull sentiment upon the point, I firmly believe that in doing so I work in the cause of Chris- tianity, of peace, of civilisation, and the happiness of the human race generally. 12

'I contend that we are the first race in the world,' wrote Cecil Rhodes, 'and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.'13 In 1891, the most popular and brilliant journalist of the day, W.T. Stead, founded the Review of Reviews. 'We believe in God, in England and in Humanity', ran the editorial manifesto in its opening number. 'The English-speaking race is one of the chief of God's chosen agents for executing coming improvements in the lot of mankind.'14 An Oxford professor was convinced in 1912 that the secret of Britain's history was that 'in fighting for her own independence she has been fighting for the freedom of Europe, and that the service thus rendered to Europe and to mankind has carried with it the possibility of that larger service to which we give the name Empire'. IS

The first world war carried this conviction to a pitch of emotional frenzy. A bare catalogue, culled from the speeches of British statesmen, of the services which British belligerency was rendering to humanity would fill many pages. In 1917, Balfour told the New York Chamber of Commerce that 'since August, 1914, the fight has been for the highest spiritual advantages of mankind, without a petty thought or ambition'. 16 The Peace Conference and its sequel tempo- rarily discredited these professions and threw some passing doubt on the belief in British supremacy as one of the moral assets of mankind. But the period of disillusionment and modesty was short. Moments of international tension, and especially moments when the possibility of war appears on the horizon, always stimulate this identification of national interest with morality. At the height of the Abyssinian crisis, the Archbishop of Canterbury admonished the French public through an interview in a Paris newspaper:

We are animated by moral and spiritual considerations. 1 do not think I am departing from my role by contributing towards the clearing up of this misunderstanding .••.

ti. The Timts,August27, 188S. 12. Ml.'lurice and Arthur, Tht Lift of Lord Wolseley, p. 314. 13. W.T. Stead, Tht I.Ast Will 111,d Testamtnt of Cecil). Rhodes, p. 58. 14. Rr11ieivo/Rtviews,Jrmuary 15, 1891. 15. Spencer Wilkinson, Govtmmeftt ,wcl tl1e \Var, p. 116. J6. Quoud in Beard, The Rist of Americdll Ci11i/isatio1t, ii. p. 646.

-184 A READER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL THEORY It is , .. no egoist interest that is driving us forward, and no considera-

tion of interest should keep you behind.'7

In the following year, Professor Toynbee was once more able to discover that the security of the British Empire 'was also the supreme interest of the whole world'.t 8 In 1937, Lord Cecil spoke to the General Council of the League of Nations Union of 'our duty to our country, to our Empire and to humanity at large', and quoted:

Not once nor twice in our rough island story The path of duty is the way to glory.19

An Englishman, as Mr Bernard Shaw remarks in The Ma11 of Destiny, 'never forgets that the nation which lets its duty get on to the opposite side to its interest is lost', It is not surprising that an American critic should recently have described the British as 'Jesuits lost to the theological but gained for the political realm',20

or that a former Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs should have commented, long before these recent manifestations, on 'that precious gift bestowed upon the British people - the possession of writers and clergyman able in perfect good faith to advance the highest moral reasons for the most concrete diplomatic action, with inevitable moral profit to England'.21

In recent times, the same phenomenon has become endemic in the United States. The story how McKinley prayed for divine guidance and decided to annex the Philippines is a classic of modern American history; and this annexa- tion was the occasion of a popular outburst of moral self-approval hitherto more familiar in the foreign policy of Great Britain than of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt, who believed more firmly than any previous American President in the doctrine L'etat, c'est moi, carried the process a step further. The following curious dialogue occurred in his cross-examination during a libel action brought against him in 1915 by a Tammany leader:

Query: How did you know that substantial justice was done? Roosevelt: Because I did it, because ... I was doing my best. Query: You mean to say that, when you do a thing, thereby substantial justice is done. Roosevelt: I do. When I do a thing, I do it so as to do substantial justice. I mean just that. 22

Woodrow Wilson was less naively egotistical, but more profoundly confident of the identity of American policy and universal justice. After the bombardment of Vera Cruz in 1914, he assured the world that 'the United States had

17. Quoted in Manchester Guardian, October 18, 1935. 18 . .Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1935, ii. p. 46. 19. Headway, November 1937. 20, Carl Becker, Yale Review, xxvii. p. 452. 21. Count Sforza 1 Foreign Affairs, October 1927, p. 67. 22. Quoted in H.F. Pringle, Theodore Roost:velt, p. 318,

,:,

CARR - 185 gone down to Mexico to serve mankind'.23 During the first world war, he advised American naval cadets 'not only always to think first of America, but always, also, to think first of humanity' - a feat rendered slightly less difficult by his explanation that the United States had been 'founded for the benefit of humanity'.2' Shortly before the entry of the United States into the war, in an address to the Senate on war aims, he stated the identification still more categorically: 'These are American principles, American policies .... They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.'25

It will be observed that utterances of this character proceed almost exclusively from Anglo-Saxon statesmen and writers. It is true that when a prominent National Socialist asserted that 'anything that benefits the German people is right, anything that harms the German people is wrong',26 he was merely pro- pounding the same identification of national interest with universal right which had already been established for English-speaking countries by Wilson, Pro- fessor Toynbee, Lord Cecil and many others. But when the claim is translated into a foreign language, the note seems forced, and the identification unconvinc- ing, even to the peoples concerned. Two explanations are commonly given of this curious discrepancy. The first explanation, which is popular.in English- speaking countries, is that the policies of the English-speaking nations are in fact more virtuous and disinterested than those of Continental states, so that Wilson and Professor Toynbee and Lord Cecil are, broadly speaking, right when they identify the American and British national interests with the interest of mankind. The second explanation, which is popular in Continental countries, is that the English-speaking peoples are past masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the guise of the general good, and that this kind of hypocrisy is a special and characteristic peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon mind.

It seems unnecessary to accept either of these heroic attempts to cut the knot. The solution is a simple one. Theories of social morality are always the product of a dominant group which identifies itself with the community as a whole, and which possesses facilities denied to subordinate groups or individuals for impos- ing its view of life on the community. Theories of international morality are, for the same reason and in virtue of the same process, the product of dominant nations or groups of nations. For the past hundred years, and more especially since 1918, the English-speaking peoples have formed the dominant group in the world; and current theories of international morality have been designed to perpetuate their supremacy and expressed in the idiom peculiar to them. France, retaining something of her eighteenth-century tradition and restored to a position of dominance for a short period after 1918, has played a minor part in the creation of current international morality, mainly through her insistence on the role of law in the moral order. Germany, never a dominant Power and

23. P,,blic Papers of Woodrow Wilson: The New Democracy, ed. R.S. Baker. 24. /Md. i. pp. 318-19. 25. Ibid. ii. p. 414. 26. Quoted in Toynbee, S,m,ey of Jnurnationa/ Affairs, 1936, p. 319.

186 -ER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS ANO POLITICAL THEORY

reduced to helplessness after 1918, has remained for these reasons outside the charmed circle of creators of international morality. Both the view that the English-speaking peoples are monopolists of international morality and the view that they are consummate international hypocrites may be reduced to the plain fact that the current canons of international virtue have, by a natural and inevitable process, been mainly created by them.

The realist critique of the harrt1ony of interest;-------,

The doctrine of the harmony of interests yields readily to analysis in terms of this principle. It is the natural assumption of a ros erous and ri_v_\!eged class, whose members ave a ommant voice in the community and are therefore naturally pr;~~-t;;-identify its intereStwithtncirown. ln Vtrtue-ofih1ffclerifffic.:- tion, any assailant of the interests ol the dominant group is made to incur the odium of assailing the alleged common interest of the whole community, and is told that in making this assault he is attacking his own higher interests. The doc- trine of the harmony of interests thus serves as an ingenious moral device invoked, in perfect sincerity, by privileged groups in order to justify and main- tain their dominant position. But a further point requires notice. The supremacy within the community of the privileged group may be, and often is, so over- whelming that there is, in fact, a sense in which its interests are those of the community, since its well-being necessarily carries with it some measure of well- being for other members of the community, and its collapse would entail the col- lapse of the community as a whole. In so far, therefore, as the alleged natural harmony of interests has any reality, it is created by the overwhelming power of the privileged group, and is an excellent illustration of the Machiavellian maxim that morality is the product of power. A few examples will make this analysis of the doctrine of the harmony of interests clear.

In the nineteenth century, the British manufacturer or merchant, having discovered that laissez-faire promoted his own prosperity, was sincerely con- vinced that it also promoted British prosperity as a whole. Nor was this alleged harmony of interests between himself and the community entirely fictitious. The predominance of the manufacturer and the merchant was so overwhelming that there was a sense in which an identity between their prosperity and British pro- sperity as a whole could be correctly asserted. From this it was only a short step to argue that a worker on strike, in damaging the prosperity of the British manufacturer, was damaging British prosperity as a whole, and thereby damag- ing his own, so that he could be plausibly denounced by the predecessors of Professor Toynbee as immoral and by the predecessors of Professor Zimmern as muddle-headed. Moreover, there was a sense in which this argument was perfectly correct. Nevertheless, the doctrine of the harmony of interests and of solidarity between the classes must have seemed a bitter mockery to the under- privileged worker, whose inferior status and insignificant stake in 'British pros- perity' were consecrated by it; and presently he was strong enough to force the

e· . ,;

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CARR - 187 abandonment of laissez-faire and the substitution for it of the 'social service state', which implicitly denies the natural harmony of interests and sets our to create a new harmony by artificial means.

The same analysis may be applied in international relations. British nineteenth-century statesmen, having discovered that free trade promoted British prosperity, were sincerely convinced that, in doing so, it also pro- moted the prosperity of the world as a whole. British predominance in world trade was at that time so overwhelming that there was a certain undeniable harmony between British interests and the interests of the world. British prosperity flowed over into other countries, and a British economic collapse would have meant world-wide ruin. British free traders could and did argue that protectionist countries were not only egotistically damaging the prosperity of the world as a whole, but were stupidly damaging their own, so that their behaviour was both immoral and muddle-headed. In British eyes, it was irrefutably proved that international trade was a single whole, and flourished or slumped together. Nevertheless, this alleged international harmony of interests seemed a mockery to those under-privileged nations whose inferior status and insignificant stake in international trade were consecrated by it. The revolt against it destroyed that overwhelming British preponderance which had provided a plausible basis for the theory. Economically, Great Britain in the nineteenth century was dominant enough to make a bold bid to impose on the world her own conception of international economic morality. When competition of all against all replaced the domination of the world market by a single Power, conceptions of international economic morality necessarily became chaotic.

Politically, the alleged community of interest in the maintenance of peace, hose ambiguous character has already been discussed, is capitalised in the same ay by a dominant nation or group of nations. Just as the ruling class in a com- unity prays for domestic peace, which guarantees its own security and

predominance, and denounces class-war, which might threaten them, so inter- national peace becomes a special vested interest of predominant Powers. In the past, Roman and British imperialism were commended to the world in the guise of the pax Romana and the pax Britannica. To-day, when no single Power is strong enough to dominate the world, and supremacy is vested in a group of nations, slogans like 'collective security' and 1resistance to aggression' serve the same purpose of proclaiming an identity of interest between the dominant group and the world as a whole in the maintenance of peace. Moreover, as in the examples we have just considered, so long as the supremacy of the dominant group is sufficiently great, there is a sense in which this identity of interesis exists. 'England', wrote a German professor in the nineteen-twenties, 'is the solitary Power with a national progtamme which, while egotistic through and through, at the same time promises to the world something which the world passionately desires: order, progress and eternal peace.'27 When Mr Churchill

27. Oibelius, England, p. 109.

188 ~-DER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL THEORY

declared that 'the fortunes of the British Empire and its glory are inseparably interwoven with the fortunes of the world', 28 this statement had precisely the same foundation in fact as the statement that the prosperity of British manufac- turers in the nineteenth century was inseparably interwoven with British pro· sperity as a whole. Moreover, the purpose of the statements was precisely the same, namely to establish the principle that the defence of the British Empire, or the prosperity of the British manufacturer, was a matter of common interest to the whole community, and that anyone who attacked it was therefore either immoral or muddle-headed. It is a familiar tactic of the privileged to throw moral discredit on the under-privileged by depicting them as disturbers of the peace; and this tactic is as readily applied internationally as within the national community. 'International law and order', writes Professor Toynbee of a recent crisis, 'were in the true interests of the whole of mankind . .. whereas the desire to perpetuate the reign of violence in international affairs was an anti-social desire which was not even in the ultimate interests of the citizens of the handful of states that officially professed this benighted and anachronistic creed.'29 This is precisely the argument, compounded of platitude and falsehood in about equal pares, which did duty in every strike in the early days of the British and American Labour movements. It was common form for employers, supported by the whole capitalist press, to denounce the 'anti-social' attitude of trade union leaders, to accuse them of attacking law and order and of introducing 'the reign of violence', and to declare that 'true' and 'ultimate' interests of the workers lay in peaceful co-operation with the employers.30 In the field of social relations, the dis- ingenuous character of this argument has long been recognised. But just as the threat of class-war by the proletarian is 'a natural cynical reaction to the sen- timental and dishonest efforts of the privileged classes to obscure the conflict of interest between classes by a constant emphasis on the minimum interests which they have in common' ,31 so the war-mongering of the dissatisfied Powers was the 'natural, cynical reaction' to the sentimental and dishonest platitudinising of the satisfied Powers on the common interest in peace. When Hitler refused to believe 'that God has permitted some nations first to acquire a world by force and then to defend this robbery with moralising theories',32 he was merely echoing in another context the Marxist denial of a community of interest between 'haves' and 'have-nots', the Marxist exposure of the interested character of 'bourgeois morality', and the Marxist demand for the expropriation of the expropriators.

The crisis of September 1938 demonstrated in a striking way the political implications of the assertion of a common interest in peace. When Briand pro- claimed that 'peace corn es before all', or Mr Eden that 'there is no dispute which

28. Winston Churchill, Arms and tht Covenont, p. 272. 29. Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1935, ii. p, 46. 30. 'Pray earnestly that right may triumph', said the representative o( the Philadclphi:i coal-owners

in an early strike organised by the United Mine Workers, 'remembering that the Lord God Omnipotent still reigns, and that His reign is one of law and order, and not o( violence and crime' (H.F. Pringle, Thtodo,e Roosevtlt, p. 267).

31. R. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p, 153. 32, Speech in the Rckhstag, JanUary JO, 1939,

'

/.

CARR - 189 cannot be settled by peaceful means' ,33 the assumption underlying these platitudes was that, so long as peace was maintained, no changes distasteful to France or Great Britain could be made in the status quo. In 1938, France and Great Britain were trapped by the slogans which they themselves had used in the past to discredit the dissatisfied Powers, and Germany had become sufficiently dominant (as France and Great Britain had hitherto been) to turn the desire for peace to her own advantage. About this time, a significant change occurred in the attitude of the German and Italian dictators. Hitler eagerly depicted Germany as a bulwark of peace menaced by war-mongering democracies. The League of Nations, he declared in his Reichstag speech of April 28, 1939, is a 'stirrer up of trouble', and collective security means \:on:inuous danger of war'. Mussolini borrowed the British formula about the possibility of settling all inter· national disputes by peaceful means, and declared that 'there are not in Europe at present problems so big and so active as to justify a war which from a Euro- pean conflict would naturally become universal'." Such utterances were symp- toms that Germany and Italy were already looking forward to the time when, as dominant Powers, they would acquire the vested interest in peace recently enjoyed by Great Britain and France, and be able to get their way by pillorying the democratic countries as enemies of peace. These developments may have made it easier to appreciate Halevy's subtle observation that 'propaganda against war is itself a form of war propaganda'.3S

---------The realist critique of internationalism / --The concept of internationalism is a special form of the doctrine of the harmony of interests. It yields to the same analysis; and there are the same difficulties about regarding it as an absolute stan · dent of the interests and policies of those who promulgate it Cosmopolitanism', rote Sun Yat-sen,.'is

\

. the same thing as China's theory of ~orldempire two thousand years ago ... China once wanted to be sovereign lord of the eaith and to stand above every other nation, so she espoused cosmopolitanism:16 in the Egypt of the Eight· eenth Dynasty, according to Freud, 'imperialism was reflected in religion as universality and monotheism'Y The doctrine of a single world-state, pro- pagated by the Roman Empire and later by the Catholic Church, was the symbol of a claim to universal dominion. Modern internationalism has its genesis in seventeenth· and eighteenth·cemury France, during which French hegemony in Europe was at its height. This was the period which produced Sully's Grand Dessin and the Abbe Saint-Pierre's Projet de Paix Perpetuel/e (both plans to perpetuate an international status quo favourable to the French monarchy), which saw the birth of the humanitarian and cosmopolitan doctrines of the

33. Ltag11t of Natium: Eighlttnth Asstmbly, p, 63. 34. The Times, May IS, 1939 . .15. lfolCvy, A History of the E11glisb Peoplt ill 1895-1905 (Engl. 1rnnsl.), i. Introduction, p. xi. .16, Sun YaMcn1 Satt Mi1t Chu I (Engl. 1ransl.), pp. 68-9, J7, Sigmund J.'rt'ud, M(Jses t111d Mmtotheism, p. 36.

190 AaER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND·P~~;~ICAL THEORY Enlightenment, and which established French as the universal language of educated people. In the next century, the leadership passed to Great Britain, which became the home of internationalism. On the eve of the Great Exhibition of I 851 which, more than any other single event, established Great Britain's title to world supremacy, the Prince Consort spoke movingly of 'that great end to which ... all history points - the realisation of the unity of mankind';38 and Tennyson hymned 'the parliament of man, the federation of the world'. France chose the moment of her greatest supremacy in the nineteen-twenties to launch a plan of 'European Union'; and Japan shortly afterwards developed an ambi- tion to proclaim herself the leader of a united Asia. It was symptomatic of the growing international predominance of the United States when widespread popularity was enjoyed in the late nineteen-thirties by the book of an American

\ journalist advocating a world union of democracies, in which the United States

1 would play the predominant role. 39

Just as pleas for 'national solidarity' in domestic politics always come from a Jominant group which can use this solidarity to strengthen its own control over the nation as a whole, so pleas for international solidarity and world union come from those dominant nations which may hope to exercise control over a unified world. Countries which are struggling to force their way into the dominant group naturally tend to invoke nationalism against the internationalism of the controlling Powers. In the sixteenth century, England opposed her nascent nationalism to the internationalism of the Papacy and the Empire. In the past century and a half Germany opposed her nascent nationalism to the inter- nationalism first of France, then of Great Britain. This circumstance made her impervious to those universalise and humanitarian doctrines which were popular in eighteenth-century France and nineteenth-century Britain; and her hostility to internationalism was further aggravated after 1919, when Great Britain and France endeavoured to create a new 'international order' as a bulwark of their own predominance. 'By "international",' wrote a German correspondent in The Times, 'we have come to understand a conception that places other nations at an advantage over our own.••0 Nevertheless, there was little doubt that Germany, if she became supreme in Europe, would adopt international slogans and establish some kind of international organisation to bolster up her power. A British Labour ex-Minister at one moment advocated the suppression of Arti- cle 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations on the unexpected ground that the totalitarian states might some day capture the League and invoke that article to justify the use of force by themselves." It seemed more likely that they would seek to develop the Anti-Comintern Pact into some form of international organisation 'The Anti-Comintern Pact', said Hitler in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, 'will perhaps one day become the crystallisation point of a group of Powers whose ultimate aim is none other than to eliminate the menace to the peace and culture of the world instigated by a satanic apparition.' 'Either Europe

38. T. Martin, U/e of the Prince Consort, iii. p. 247, -'9. Cluencc Streit, U11io11 Now, 40. 1'he Times, November 5, 1938. 41. Lord Marley in the House 0£ Lords, November 30, 1938: Official Report, col. 258,

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CARR - 191 must achieve solidarity,' remarked an Italian journal about the same time, 'or the "axis" will impose it.'42 'Europe in its entirety', said Goebbels, 'is adopting a new order and a new orientation under the intellectual leadership of National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy .'43 These were symptoms not of a change of heart, but of the fact that Germany and Italy felt themselves to be approaching the time when they might become strong enough to espouse internationalism. 'International order' and 'international solidarity' will always be slogans of those who feel strong enough to impose them on others.

The exposure of the real basis of the professedly abstract principles commonly invoked in international politics is the most damning and most convincing part of the realist indictment of utopianism. The nature of the charge is frequently misunderstood by those who seek to refute it. The charge is not that human beings fail to live up to their principles. It matters little that Wilson, who thought that the right was more precious than peace, and Briand, who thought that peace came even before justice, and Mr Eden, who believed in collective security, failed themselves, or failed to induce their countrymen, to apply these principles con- sistently. What matters is that these supposedly absolute and universal principles were not principles at all, but the unconscious reflexions of national policy based on a particular interpretation of national interest at a particular time. There is a sense in which peace and co-operation between nations or classes or indivi· duals is a common and universal end irrespective of conflicting interests and politics. There is a sense in which a common interest exists in the maintenance of order, whether it be international order or 'law and order' within the nation. But as soon as the attempt is made to apply these supposedly abstract principles to a concrete political situation, they are revealed as the transparent disguises of selfish vested interesrs. The bankruptcy of utopianism resides not in its failure to live up to its principles, but in the exposure of its inability to provide any absolute and disinterested standard for the conduce of international affairs. The utopian, faced by the collapse of standards whose interested character he has failed to penetrate, takes refuge in condemnation of a reality which refuses to conform to these standards. A passage penned by the German historian Meinecke after the first world war is the best judgment by anticipation of the role of utopianism in the international politics of the period:

The profound defect of the Western, natural-law type of thought was that, when applied to the real life of the state, it remained a dead letter, did not penetrate the consciousness of statesmen, did not hinder the modern hypertrophy of state interest, and so led either to aimless complaints and doctrinaire suppositions or else to inner falsehood and cant. 44

These 'aimless complaints', these 'doc;trinaire suppositions', this 'inner falsehood and cant' will be familiar to all those who have studied what was written about international politics in English-speaking countries between the two world wars.

42. Rdaiirmi J11tematim1<1/i, quoted in The Times, December 5, 1938. 43. Vcilkisrl,rr Brnhachtn, Arri! I, 19.l9. 44. Meinc-cke, Staatriiso11, p. 5JJ.