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his point was that liberals wildly exaggerated the capacity of collectivities of
humans to behave in ways that were truly moral (Niebuhr 1932). Niebuhr
held that ‘men’ had the capacity to be good, but that this capacity was
always in conflict with the sinful, acquisitive and aggressive drives that are also
present in human nature. These drives are given full scope in society and it
is unrealistic to think that they can be harnessed to the goal of international
peace and understanding in bodies such as the League of Nations.
These are powerful ideas which resonate later, but the intense Christian
spirit with which they are infused – and the pacifism to which, initially at
least, they gave rise in Niebuhr – limited their influence in the 1930s.
Instead, the most influential critique of liberal internationalism came from
a very different source, E. H. Carr, the quasi-Marxist historian, journalist
and, in the late 1930s, Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics.
Carr produced a number of studies in the 1930s, the most famous of which
was published in 1939 – The Twenty Years Crisis (Carr 1939/2001). This book
performed the crucial task of providing a new vocabulary for International
Relations theory. Liberal internationalism is renamed ‘utopianism’ (later
writers sometimes use ‘idealism’) and contrasted with Carr’s approach
which is termed ‘realism’. Carr’s central point is that the liberal doctrine of
the harmony of interests glosses over the real conflict that is to be found in
international relations, which is between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’.
A central feature of the world is scarcity – there are not enough of the good
things of life to go around. Those who have them want to keep them, and
therefore promote ‘law and order’ policies, attempting to outlaw the use of
violence. The ‘have-nots’, on the other hand, have no such respect for the
law, and neither is it reasonable that they should, because it is the law that
keeps them where they are, which is under the thumb of the ‘haves’.
Politics has to be based on an understanding of this situation. It is utopian
to suggest that the have-nots can be brought to realize that they ought to
behave legally and morally. It is realistic to recognize that the essential con-
flict between haves and have-nots must be managed rather than wished
away. It is utopian to imagine that international bodies such as the League
of Nations can have real power. Realists work with the world as it really is,
utopians as they wish it to be. In fact, as Ken Booth has demonstrated, Carr
wished to preserve some element of utopian thought, but, nonetheless, real-
ism was his dominant mode (Booth 1991b). The power of words here is
very great – the way in which ‘realism’, a political doctrine which might be
right or wrong, becomes associated with ‘realistic’, which is a quality of
judgement most people want to possess, is critically important in its success.
Carr’s position reveals its quasi-Marxist origins, and its debt to
Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, in its stress on material scarcity and
its insistence that law and morality serve the interests of dominant groups
(Mannheim 1936/1960). On the other hand, the fact that the ‘have-nots’ of
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the 1930s were, on his account, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy
suggests that Carr’s Marxism was laced with a degree of power-worship –
an impression also conveyed by his monumental A History of Soviet Russia
(1978), which is often regarded as being rather too generous in its judge-
ment of Stalin. The first edition of The Twenty Years Crisis contained
favourable judgements of appeasement that Carr thought prudent to tone
down in the second edition (Fox 1985). Nonetheless, Carr made a number
of effective points. It was indeed the case that the League of Nations and the
idea of collective security was tied up with the peace settlement of 1919 and
therefore could be seen as defending the status quo. Equally, the leading
status-quo nations, Britain and France, had not built up their position in the
world by strict adherence to the rule of law, however much the British might
wish to tell themselves that they had acquired their empire in a fit of absent-
mindedness. But, above all, it was the policy failure of liberal international-
ism as outlined above which gave Carr’s ideas such salience and credence.
As is often the way, a new theory is called into being by the failure of an old
theory.
In any event, realism seemed to offer a more coherent and accurate
account of the world than the liberal ideas it critiqued, and it formed the
basis for the ‘post-war synthesis’ which is the subject of the next section of
this chapter. However, before leaving the original version of liberal interna-
tionalism behind, there are a few general points that can be made. First, it is
becoming clear that the liberal account of the origins of the First World
War was faulty at a number of points, two of which still have considerable
significance. The modern historiography of the origins of the war suggests
that the gut feeling of Allied public opinion at the time (that Germany
started the war as a deliberate act of policy) was rather more to the point
than the more refined view of liberal intellectuals to the effect that no one
was to blame. Of greater significance is the second point, which is that
Germany in 1914 was not the militarist autocracy that some liberals took it
to be. In reality, it was a constitutional state, governed by the rule of law,
and with a government which was responsible to Parliament as well as to
the Emperor. Certainly, it was not a ‘democracy’ – but then no country was
in 1914; even the widest franchises (in the United States and France)
excluded women from the vote. What this suggested was that the liberal
view that constitutional, liberal-democratic regimes are less likely to engage
in war than other types of regime required a great deal of refinement (which
it received towards the end of the twentieth century in the form of the
Democratic Peace thesis, discussed in Chapters 4 and 10 below).
A second point that is worth making here is that some of the criticisms of
liberal internationalism – including some made above – take too little notice
of the unique quality of the threat posed to international order in the 1930s.
To put the matter bluntly, we must hope that it was rather unusual for the
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leaders of two of the most powerful countries in the world – Germany and
the USSR – to be certifiable madmen. The lunatic nature of Hitler’s plans to
replant the world with true Aryans makes him an exceptional character to
be a leader of any kind of state, let alone a Great Power – it is this latter point
which makes comparison with figures such as Saddam Hussein misleading.
The Munich analogy has been applied repeatedly since 1945, and ‘appeaser’
is still one of the worst insults that can be thrown at a diplomat, but all the
dictators the world has thrown up since then – Nasser, Castro, Hussein –
have been mere shadows of the real thing, not so much because of their
personalities but because of their lack of access to the sinews of world
power. Judging a set of ideas by their capacity to cope with a Hitler or
a Stalin seems to set far too high a standard.
In a similar vein, it is striking how much of liberal internationalism has
survived its defeat at the hands of realism. The ‘settled norms’ of the con-
temporary international order are still essentially those of 1919 – national
self-determination, non-aggression and respect for international law com-
bined with support for the principles of sovereignty. The United Nations is,
in effect, a revision of the League of Nations, even if it was convenient
to gloss over this in 1945. Liberal internationalism is, without doubt, an
incoherent and flawed doctrine and we are still attempting to cope with its
contradictions – in particular its belief that nationalism and democracy are
compatible notions – but it is, nonetheless, a remarkably resilient doctrine,
possibly because the values it represents seem to be widely shared by the
peoples of the world.